How Valuable Do you Find LinkedIn Connections?
Hello fellow primates,
Hope you are all well, deal flow is good, and that you have enough PTO days for a great summer vacation. Was curious to see people's thoughts on the value of LinkedIn connections.
About to start out my career and personally have seen little opportunity for networking via LinkedIn. It's definitely been a tool I've consistently used to find people and their emails, but have found that most don't reply or even check their LinkedIn messages, and so I've had exponentially higher levels of success connecting with people via email.
However, since joining my firm I've had success with adding people as connections that I feel that I haven't been able to add previously; global heads of MF PE funds, notable execs in F500 companies, etc.
My question is for the more career tenured people on this forum, how do you view these connections? Are they worth anything beyond having a laugh with the lads that you're connected with X?
Thanks in advance!
We got hr people who manage our linkedins if we want so I just let those ladies crank
Is that just for the company posts I keep seeing from MDs? Is there another benefit for having it managed by HR besides that for you? I imagine they take care of referring people trying to network to more official channels too.
You just get inundated with that, 23 year old recruiters trying to get you to take absurdly junior and low paid roles, marketers, software/service salesmen, etc.
Most people don’t do it, but I also don’t think people really respond to them these days.
Try looking up then firm’s email template and emailing directly to set some time up - I do respond to those and have connected with some folks who really helped my career by doing that.
Yes I find it highly valuable. I have 722 connections and have gotten jobs through LinkedIn.
Bragging about the number of LinkedIn connections you have is insane.
I guess it depends on your purpose and your industry. I do not network much but people reach out to me frequently to connect. For me, it has been a very unreliable source of business. In the past 10-15 years, I have only had a few clients from connections. Most people who reach out are trying to sell me an unappealing job or are people I do not know who are looking for free advice.
Had some great networking calls with cold LinkedIn adds during my recent job search. Didn't lead to any significant leads but 2 calls stuck out as very helpful in terms of how I should view my short term / long term goals (especially an ex PE healthcare investor who is now in the healthcare startup world, was honest about his experiences and thoughts of the career move I was trying to make). Hard to follow up with them after a call or two though since it came through on a cold email and it took me 2-3 tries after following up with this guy after we initially connected to get a 30 minute call on his calendar.
I still add random folks in my industry and if I find their background interesting, I sometimes send a cold message and get a response ~20% of the time. Not currently looking for a new role so haven't done this in awhile.
LinkedIn connections are genuine. I got job through the LinkedIn connection.
LinkedIn is a useless platform for sad tryhards. Any "connection" I have on LinkedIn that could possibly be "useful" to me is because I actually have a relationship with them off the platform.
Yeah ditto here. One of my mentors rarely checks LinkedIn or engages on the platform. I usually give career updates via text / email instead of expecting them to see it on a LinkedIn announcement.
For the sake of having an inbound of interesting opportunities, I think most white collar professionals create LinkedIn profiles and just keep a lookout for those rather than engaging with other non-recruiter professionals on LinkedIn (which can sure be cringey).
Mostly leveraging company / university alumni at target companies when I'm changing roles.
Negative value
C'mon bro. I recently have been growing a business and capital raising and LinkedIn is really pulling through for me. I didn't use LinkedIn much in the past 15 years, but now things are clicking and my new staff for the company are falling into place.
I value my real connections eg people I stay in touch with LinkedIn is just a glorified tech enabled Rolodex.
Look - just make connections when you're young and you don't even have to message anybody. Then when you're older 30% of your LinkedIn friends are now MDs or Directors in their work. It is really amazing. It is a bit of survival bias, but still they are your connections.
The one lame feature of linkedin I can’t stand is those stupid videos on the front page. Which genius came up with this idea?
LinkedIn connections mean nothing unless you've actually spoken to the person and could potentially ask them for a favor, recommendation to a role, or leverage that connection professionally. It's the adult equivalent of when we were all in middle school comparing how many friends different kids had on FB (South Park episode on that was magnificent).
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