I took a one year hiatus from LinkedIn starting in November 2014. I didn't miss much.
When I joined LinkedIn back in 2006 the service was pretty simple. A user's profile consisted of basic biographical information, loose geographic region, and a summary of educational and professional history. Email notifications were sparse and infrequent, arriving only with invitations to connect with peers or from direct messages. Premium users were either incredibly rare or not interested in a post-collegiate individual with little work experience.
Over a period of several years LinkedIn added new functionality, bit by bit. With each new feature it seemed like additional notifications were added. Combined with my increasing experience and visibility in several lucrative industries, the rate of emails increased dramatically.
Eventually I felt like I was fighting a daily deluge of email from LinkedIn:
At some point I said "enough already" and went into my LinkedIn preferences to start disabling things. While I was unchecking a vast number of notification options, I asked myself "what exactly am I getting out of this service?" I decided to find out.
I didn't want to disable or delete my LinkedIn account, since I might very well need it at some point. You never know when you might need to reach out to your network in search of a new opportunity.
Instead, I figured I'd just ignore it.
I created the following Gmail filter to archive all emails originating from LinkedIn.
Matches: from:(@linkedin.com)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label "LinkedIn"
I marked the "LinkedIn" label to be hidden from my message list, made a note on my whiteboard to check on things in a year, and that was it.
LinkedIn wasn't ever one of my daily destinations. Unlike the once-great Google Reader, which I'd proactively load up at the beginning of each day and keep open in my browser, my interaction with LinkedIn had always been reactive. When I did visit the site, I didn't find myself getting lost clicking through LinkedIn profiles like you might watching YouTube videos or reading Wikipedia articles.
My daily routine didn't change much, other than I didn't find myself looking at, sorting, archiving, or taking action in response to LinkedIn notification emails.
It's been one year.
If I had given up email for a year, I definitely would have noticed, been inconvenienced in some major ways, and missed out on some pretty big life events. If I had given up Twitter for a year, I'd have missed the social interaction. But forgoing LinkedIn for a year, it didn't feel like anything was missing.
Caveat: I've been employed at the same company for the duration of this experiment, wasn't in the process of looking for a new job, and I haven't had any business reason to be scouring LinkedIn for candidates or sales leads.
But what about lost opportunities? To lose something implies that you had the thing at some point. If you don't know about the potential opportunities, are they really lost? Maybe. I don't know.
Catching up with my father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate?
After a year without LinkedIn, I don't think I've missed much. I'll have to analyze all those emails to be sure.
I went through and categorized the year's worth of emails from LinkedIn. Sorting by subject into buckets was the easiest part, after which I further dug into some of the buckets. Far from scientific, but I feel I got a good sense of the corpus.
Broken out by approximate subject:
Of all the invitations to connect:
Of those people I didn't know, 39% were recruiters, 61% were just completely random.
Well under 1% each:
Things to be on the lookout for, but that I didn't actually see.
I ended up finding a lot of coworkers, which makes sense given that our company is growing and I send a lot of email. I do wonder how many people actually hand out their contact list to LinkedIn (either via login credentials or via iOS or Android applications).
Many people are somewhat wary of providing their email credentials to 3rd party sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, yet we rarely get a choice if we're using their respective mobile applications. I feel like we've all sold our contact lists for the sake of convenience.
I have noticed a large increase in the number of recruiters with Premium accounts. These are people who aren't connected to my social graph at all (technically within 3 degrees, since that's where LinkedIn caps things). Their emails are usually just as bad as cold calls, devoid of substantial description of new opportunities.
Similarly, most of the recruiters from my own company have requested to be connected. And why wouldn't they? If they were directly connected to me, they'd gain access to all of my contacts with a degree of reputability that they wouldn't have otherwise. Good in the short term for them, possibly good for my contacts, but also possibly annoying to my contacts and harmful for my employer. Recruiters come and go, but the connections we forge on LinkedIn require manual removal. And why provide a competitor access to your contacts? Moreover (and selfishly) why provide your own recruiters access? Take that referral fee yourself.
I've decided not to connect with recruiters on LinkedIn, either internal or external. While my contact list and network could be beneficial to my employer's recruiters, I'm not thrilled about the mechanics of it. My network, built over time through personal relationships, to be used in a highly impersonal way in order to meet staffing goals. That doesn't sit well with me.
I would much rather make a personal introduction between one of my connections and one of our hiring managers. Not only do I receive a referral should they get hired, I get satisfaction from making a good match. More important, I get satisfaction from avoiding bad matches.
Even if I were thrilled about the mechanics, I think about the long-term. If one of our recruiters were to transition to a different company (or a competitor), they still have access to my network. Not only does that put us in competition for candidates, but it provides valuable insight into our employee's current assignments and projects. It's a little scary how much detail some people will put into LinkedIn profiles.
I've decided not to connect with anyone in sales, quota-carrying or otherwise, for similar reasons. Why should my associates become my competitors' prospects?
Are these mechanisms foolproof? No, of course not. People change roles all the time, some from post-sales into pre-sales.
Could these decisions bite me in the ass if/when I'm looking for employment? Sure, but I'll take those odds. I'll continue to bet on my personal network.
After a year-long hiatus, I'm back on LinkedIn. Kinda sorta.
My LinkedIn profile has been updated with a more detailed work history. I've added links to my Twitter account, my presentations on SlideShare (which LinkedIn now owns), and my blog.
I used to purposefully exclude these things because they weren't strictly work related. I used to believe that professionalism was largely the absence of personal interests, but now I believe that a healthy career includes a mixture of both. I can certainly separate the two when appropriate, but I'd prefer a prospective employer be aware of the whole picture. If they can't handle the whole picture, it's probably not the right place for me.
I might attempt to keep my profile up to date, but it'll likely stay the way it is for some time. Just like before, LinkedIn isn't a daily destination for me.
If you sent me something on LinkedIn in the last year, know that it wasn't just you I was ignoring. If it's still relevant you might want to re-send, but know that I may still ignore you; similar to my rules for engaging on Twitter, I'm pretty picky about who I connect with on LinkedIn.
Last Modified: 2020-08-09
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