I got another request to join someone’s linkedin network.  I seem to be registered there: some time in the past, in a moment of weakness, I went and signed up on receiving an invite from someone I know to be genuine.

At the bottom of the invite is a one-line carrot: “Fact: Adding 5 connections makes you 3.7x more likely to receive a job offer“.  I guess they have some stats to support the assertion.

Of course they can’t know every job offer anyone receives.  Maybe they can come somewhere near to knowing every offer that goes through some process they facilitate.  Perhaps the “fact” taken with appropriate qualifiers is reasonably well supported.

So that’ll be “people who are more active on linkedin are more likely to find a job through linkedin”.  Sounds reasonable.

But now they’re using “find a job” as a carrot.  So that’ll be self-fulfilling: people in the jobs market are more likely to take the carrot and become more active there, while others are more likely to ignore it.  How is that better than (or even as good as) signing up at a jobs site?  Ah, right, it’s somewhere you can look without admitting (maybe even to yourself) you’re on that game?

But maybe there’s a real advantage: ‘normal’ jobs boards are overwhelmingly dominated by recruiters who lack techie knowledge of their market, and work on buzzwords of random relevance.  That kind of thing is a complete waste of time if you’ve rejected the ratrace career in the Dilbertian office.