Not having LinkedIn is ruining your chances. Candidates without a LinkedIn are going to come across as a scam in the very least, 90% of the time your application will just get tossed if you can't be found on LI.
Pretty much this. I know lot of people hate Linkedin but the fact is that if you are a job candidate and have little to no Linkedin, it's a huge potential red flag in today's world. Lot of scammers, overemployeds/moonlighters out there.
When I was moonlighting LinkedIn didn’t affect me. Every time I applied/interviewed and got hired for a w2 job, I just left my last non moonlighting employer on there, and checked the “please don’t contact current employer” checkbox. I hadn’t worked there in over a year.
Didn’t my new employer want me to update my LinkedIn? That never came up, but if it would have I would have delayed. Why should I support their business model.
At its most basic, this is a cult of qualification which no longer provides real value, it fails for a number of reasons I won't get into here.
When you disqualify arbitrarily, and can't find anyone because of that, its your fault for disqualifying everyone, not the market's fault for not having the ballerina that doesn't exist.
Want a programmer in a language thats only 10 years old with 15 years of direct experience? You aren't going to find it even when the creator of that language applies.
You pay to have the work done. That is the only legitimate requirement for hiring someone and remaining employed, and you can't go and change the requirements later when they show they can do more. Doesn't matter if they moonlight, are overemployed etc. That view to disqualify such people are in fact monopolistic practices designed to disenfranchise wages that are already low and distorted because of money-printing, they are not red-flags.
Its like the flawed type of thinking that "We need someone to do this work, but this guy is so overqualified he'll leave first chance; so we won't hire anyone".
You hire to have a job done. You don't get to be an arbitrary slave master.
The moment you lose sight of this is the moment you ignore your immediate needs, and drive your company on a path towards failure, and if its a consolidated large company, that failure and bad decisionmaking will impact a lot more people because of the centralization/concentration.
Financial engineering can decouple the need for immediate action, but the tradeoff is that the risk of not doing things you should have done becomes far greater to your long-term sustainability, and its completely invisible. There is no place for deception and coercion in the hiring process. If the job doesn't exist, don't jam communication channels. Jamming channels is tortuous interference.
The point is that when you have 100 Resumes to sort through for 1 role, you will have to use process of elimination. In 2025, with AI/scams/bots/moonlighters, Linkedin Profile is a good way to sort through. I am not saying having Linkedin is the only thing that matters but when there is so much noise, you need to stand out especially as a real human.
Sure, there is naturally a sieving process in any hiring, and the issue of AI/scams/bots is simple to solve because it was solved before AI was around before people got lazy. Fraud and misrepresentation isn't a new thing or even "being unsolve-able except in just one way, your chosen route".
The answer is simple...
Require that they come in and show up physically to the office to verify their CV/application/Driver's License, and at that time since there will be cost on the business side, also cross-check if they fit other open positions you have, or if they are interested in hearing about other positions (the answer will almost certainly be yes). Rapidly promoting from within naturally bubbles the competent to positions without a lot of external risk like what you've described.
This is how you build a resilient pipeline of talent, and vet the soft skills people who would be good at the job that you'll never find through an interview except by moonshot chance. When you structure it from the get-go to exclude excessively and use bad indicators, you have bad data in and get bad outcomes out.
> LinkedIn Profile is a good way to sort through.
Its not, there are plenty of fake LinkedIn Profiles. You can't stand out as a real human when you have pigeonholed everyone into a circular peg and set the sieve requirements to a square peg. Forcing people to all go through a online centralized portal, even when they show up in person, is what promotes these perverse incentives. Not rocket science.
As a business you can do a lot to solve problems, and there's no way you can stand out as a human among the noise of digital artifacts where bots mimic real humans in the same digital environment. Go physical.
I've friends who are executives that do hiring, their main complaints were we've tried to hire people for X positions, and our top 10 candidates were all fake, we spent months on this with numerous interviews (cost) and have to start all over from scratch.
I pointed out the answer is rather stupid simple. Go old school verify the inputs are real at the beginning of the process, not at the end after you sunk all those costs. That's what they've been doing since then and it works.
Finding the right talent is a cost you have to pay that you can't push off on other businesses through use of products or services where that business may lie/misrepresent because each business is different, and if you depend upon that one pipeline for talent they can and will eventually cause issues where you can't find talent.
The attitude you seem to have mirrors the same things I see in people who simply don't want to pay the cost to get competent people, and by extension don't want to actually be in business.
Also, conditions worsen when you spoil an entire labor pool over decades through bad management in consolidated hands, it gets harder and costlier to find qualified labor. Its the nature of ponzi; costs go up unti outflows exceed inflows.
If you don't get ahead of the labor crunch, it will crush you, and most competent people given the adverse circumstances in hiring are now retraining resulting in brain-drain, a hollowing out and watering down of the competency in the labor pool. What happens when you can't find qualified people at any cost because your practices drove them to other sectors. They won't come back because they wrote it off as a bad investment. Its psychologically sticky.
People always have a choice, even when others try to make it so they don't.
In addition to possibly being a scammer, some people found my resume to be less believable without a linkedin profile. One interviewer thought I was lying about my previous job title.
Why would it matter what your previous job title was? Why would I care if your previous job title was ‘Grand Vizier of Khyrgistan’? Can you do the job I want you to do now?
If your previous job title was "Doer of a Thing" then a prospective employer is more likely to consider you for a job doing the same (or similar) thing, as it shows you have prior experience doing a thing.
No, it shows that you previously had a job title that calls you a doer of things. I find that these don’t generally correlate with ability to actually do those things.
noobs on HN have been claiming this since the site was created. It's so tiresome that it's actually against site guidelines to make this kind of comment. If you want HN to be a nicer place than reddit, try to follow the guidelines.
Agree with this, unfortunately. I have a coworker who routinely calls people without linkedins "sketchy" and obsessively looks everyone else, vendors, functional area colleagues, etc up on linkedin. I didn't have a very fleshed out linkedin myself because I value privacy and was surprised how biased some people are about it. I've also seen candidates who have otherwise passed interview panels get veto'd because the dates on their linkedins don't match their CVs.
I don’t have a LinkedIn and it has impaired my job hunts in the past but I always worry that creating one now (without the references of colleagues from decades of past work) would look worse than not having one?
Nah that’s not a thing. Get involved spend an afternoon setting it up and then it will suggest a bunch of people you’ve probably worked with in the past. They’ll be happy to connect and then it’s a good point to catch up and drop the “I’m in the market”.
If anybody used to enjoy working with you and they know of something it, should be easy enough from then on.
Do people still do endorsements on LinkedIn? There was an initial flurry when that "feature" launched but I haven't been endorsed for anything for I think the past decade. Really the only things I do on LinkedIn are update my job history and accept connections from coworkers.
Imho, anything past where you've worked on LinkedIn is a waste of time.
And arguably even a negative signal. Productive people have jobs to do instead of grinding Monopoly karma. Yes, this absolutely includes LinkedIn thought leadership.
I know MS and recruiters love to push the 'it matters' line, but I'd ask the reader -- who would you rather hire: someone who wow'd in an interview or someone with LinkedIn flair?
> who would you rather hire: someone who wow'd in an interview or someone with LinkedIn flair?
Who would you rather interview: someone who has a great resume, and a strong LinkedIn profile, and connections to a strong peer community who can endorse them, or a faceless rando that shows up in your inbox with a PDF, amongst thousands of others, with zero referrals?
I'm not endorsing LI grind -- I too hate it, but ignore at your own peril. OP seems to be in a rather precarious situation, so maybe it would help being a bit less dogmatic.
> who would you rather hire: someone who wow'd in an interview or someone with LinkedIn flair?
Wrong question. This is not about the hiring stage.
Who would I rather move on to a phone screen: someone with an empty or nonexistent linkedin profile, or someone with a profile which matches their resume and has many connections to other people who worked at the same companies?
While I hate to have to say it is the latter, that's where we are today with AI-generated fake resumes.
I have 344 resumes left to review tonight. Those that don't match their linkedin profile history have no chance (unless they are a direct colleague referral).
As I take a break on friday night from reading through an endless pile of resumes for a role I'm hiring...
I would suggest creating the linkedin profile but be sure to fully populate the job descriptions for each job (or as far back as you care to go) and spend some time looking up past colleagues from each one and send them invites to connect.
I'm finding that a completely blank linkedin profile (listing only companies but zero detail) is a bigger red flag than not having a linkedin profile.
But having a profile with job description info and a network of connections from each job adds credibility. When a resume looks borderline suspicious, I dig through the persons connections in linkedin to see if it looks like they really worked at each of those places. Even better if I find any shared connections, which is a stronger signal that I'm looking at a real person not an AI bot.
Also, building that network of connections can be a source of job leads on its own.
Man, for 15 years I’ve been working on projects that are not LinkedIn friendly. For example, online casinos where my coworkers all have pseudonyms. Or taking 1-2 years to work on a personal project that fizzles out. Not to menion, surfing for 2 years.
I'm in a terrible position for when I need to find a normal job, and comments like this don't let me forget it!
not a recruiter: I have never felt that recruiters pay attention to linkedin references specifically.
You can also make one, add people, and then ask for a few references. "I just finally made a linkedin in 2025 on a lark" is a perfectly cromulent icebreaker/reason to ask.
It is better to have 1 than not. I highly recommend you set it up now. Put a real picture. Too much noise these days and without a Linkedin Profile, lot of employers are not even going to look at you. Just stating facts.
Seconding. These days I will rarely talk to anyone without a verified LinkedIn or other presence like a clearly inhabited GitHub (and I’m not looking for hyperactivity by any means)
But why? Those things are easy to game, and speaking personally, I don't have an online software development presence like Github because I don't spend my off time working on anything I feel is worth sharing.
If i’m hiring for eng director in my industry I'm expecting at least a few 2nd/3rd common connections so i can backchannel. Without that i assume its someone who hasnt gotten along with anyone at beast or a scammer at worst
Numbers. I’ve read thousands of resumes over the past few months, screened dozens of applicants, and experienced a wide variety of weirdness and fakes both in resumes and on screen calls. Please note that I’m talking about raw “application box resumes”. Referrals and other semi-vetted sources don’t get this level of scrutiny.
I gave two examples of secondary sources, but what I’m really getting at here is that the numbers and noise are so, so high now (not to mention staffing firm fronts and foreign actors) that I usually need more signal than a solid-looking resume before investing even 30’ in a screening call.
Well, that sucks. The one thing I hate about Linked in is being up-rated on my skills by people who barely know what I do and certainly have never worked with me in any capacity or even discussed my work in any sense beyond "What do you do for a living?".
From where I sit, it's a tool for marketers and recruiters to gather data and it's otherwise completely useless.
One of my pet peeves are people who don’t understand what I call “gravity problems”. You may not like gravity. But that doesn’t mean you jump off of a 30 story building and hope to survive.
Whether I like LinkedIn or not is completely irrelevant. I play the game, add connections, post a few banal “Thought Leadership” posts, ask for recommendations, etc.
My remote job at BigTech fell into my lap in mid 2020 and at 46 because an internal recruiter reached out to me, I got my next job two years ago within a week after I started looking because of targeted LinkedIn outreach. My current job also fell into my lap two weeks after I started looking because an internal recruiter reached out to me.
It does absolutely no good being good at your job if no one knows it.
I think even in the current job market, someone would give me a job or a contract relatively quickly if I needed one based on my network, LinkedIn profile, and positive impressions I’ve made in my niche over the past 7 years.
How else would someone know about me and how would I connect with them? I can change my status to “Open to Work” and have 1200 people see it My specific niche is strategy consulting along with hands on keyboard work for smaller projects and before that, I was hired at 3 separate companies by a new to the company director/CTO to lead initiatives. At that level it’s all about knowing how to “influence” and communicate.
I’m not bragging, I’m old. I should have that type of experience and network.
How does LinkedIn factor into your experience and network is what I mean. You can’t tell me people cold call you through linkedin. If people contact you it might be through linkedin, but that’s only because their friends have been talking about you. LinkedIn isn’t what gives you work, it’s the fact that you’ve done good work for others.
I think that's the key difference. For strategy folks, it makes sense to demonstrate this kind of work through that kind of channel. But LinkedIn posts aren't relevant for non-networking roles.
The parent poster has “25 years of exp, director of engineering managerial/technical type”. He should be selling himself as a strategy person. In today’s market you have to be networking regardless especially for remote work. Even before I started doing the BS influencer mess, two of my last three jobs were based on internal recruiters reaching out to me.
So exactly how was a company in Seattle going to find out about me in Atlanta if not through LinkedIn to offer me a remote job paying 50% more than i was making? How were the next two companies where I worked remotely going to know anything about me?
