How has LinkedIn actually impacted my career

Originally appeared on Quora (https://www.quora.com/Has-LinkedIn-actually-impacted-your-career-How-so/answer/Vladimir-Novakovski).

It definitely has to some extent, although less than I would have expected and in surprising ways.

My mental model of LinkedIn when I had first heard about the service 10–15 years ago was that it’s a connector between professionals and opportunities. The reality seems a bit different. LinkedIn is mostly a system of record of your past professional experience and education and who you have worked with before. This is very useful in its own right and clearly they have monetized this data well mostly for sourcing and sales prospecting.

I personally have not gotten any value out of LinkedIn in terms of career opportunities for me. In fact, I have gotten much more of that through Quora, even though that’s not at all what Quora was built for. (I have had companies reach out for strategic consulting or executive search, book authors and journalists get quotes from me, etc.) .

Where I have gotten value out of LinkedIn is as a hiring manager and a manager ofhiring managers and recruiters. During times of rapid growth where we were desperate to find strong candidates for particular roles, the LinkedIn Premium product and advanced search functionality was an integral part in achieving those goals. Moreover, by having a strong network of first-degree connections, I was able to get to a point where answering the question “Is someone credible?” could be as a first approximation as simple as “Is someone a second-degree connection?” — obviously that’s not very fair but it’s much better than nothing during crunch time.

So for me as a user, the TLDR of LinkedIn is that it’s great to connect people when one side or the other side is desperate (or, in rare cases, both). It’s a numbers game with a lot of noise but the network effects of being the biggest marketplace do come through. I’ve had times when I have been desperate as a hiring manager and never as a potential candidate, so that explains my utility of LinkedIn. Here are some additional thoughts from a former LinkedIn data lead that offer more of a bird’s eye view: Daniel Tunkelang’s answer to How could LinkedIn be disrupted?

I do think there is a significant gap remaining of connecting people neither of whom are desperate but still opportunistic and mutually relevant. This is the problem we are solving with my team as we build Lunchclub! See also How can machine learning be applied to professional networking? and join the waitlist at https://lunchclub.ai/.