By way of an experiment, I removed absolutely everything from my profile on LinkedIn. It made absolutely no difference to the number of people visiting it (20 per week on average) or the number of people clicking through to my personal website. So at http://gr.linkedin.com/in/alexanderchalkidis you can only see a very brief description of my studies. All my recommendations have disappeared as LinkedIn considers them “unassigned”.
The data I have to assess the situation is limited as I refuse to pay for a premium LinkedIn subscription. A “senior manager” or “someone in the management function” has been looking at my profile. Quite often I can figure out who it was in relation to what I have been doing or writing. I may have found LinkedIn extremely useful on several occasions, particularly setting up new business in a new country or region, but it is not worth paying for in order to know more. I don’t do recruiting that often and even if I did, there are plenty other tools around. Spending anymore time with LinkedIn other than the once a week I do now would demote it to Facebook timewasting status! (Or Branchout – the latest of Facebook’s advertised LinkedIn killers…)
A couple of years back I wrote that “the social media profile is a particularly bad way of making an impression” and now I just put my money where my mouth was! I suppose for junior positions it may make sense but any headhunter worth his or her salt will find me through my 1500 contacts and what they think about the results I can bring to a business; no fancy or empty resume is of any use at this level.
