Hello to everyone, I’m back with another edition of my blog-posting/ranting.

As a recruiter, there are a handful of things I use all day as my day-to-day tools, mainly my phone, my emails and of course, LinkedIn. There are a few things I’ve learned from using LinkedIn 9 hours a day that I thought I’d outline here in this (not) very serious post.

Football Agents think they can source Professional Footballers using LinkedIn

Okay, this is frankly ridiculous. Now I’m sure that there are budding footballers on LinkedIn looking for a chance professional/semi-pro contract in any country they can, and to be fair the salaries are still pretty decent (and by decent, I mean about 20 times my salary), but honestly, come on. I think the agents must look at themselves in the mirror, take a heavy sigh and realise it is a serious punt to start looking for the next Lionel Messi on LinkedIn, but some of them seem to be pretty delusional. It’s worth noting that just about every person that scrolls past these posts (me included) think it is proper good fun to tag their friend/colleague suggesting they can play for a second division team in Iran which makes these even more laughable. To all football agents I have upset in the past by suggesting our Head of Content is a ‘calm presence on the back-line, and surprisingly fast for a centre-back’, I am honestly sorry… but I will definitely not stop pretending he was a youth player for West Ham United.

If you create publicity on LinkedIn for a company then you will get an interview

This one isn’t necessarily bad, really. It’s really good that companies will offer interviews to people standing outside major London train stations holding signs about the jobs they’re looking for. It’s also great that companies will offer jobs to people that send in shoes (no seriously, actually sending in shoes) with their CV, ‘to get their foot in the door’. I know that being creative can make you a stand-out, but the more these things are shared around the more people copy them because they see it’s working – I really hope it doesn’t become a formality to send a pair of brogues in with any job application. More importantly – why are all these supposedly super-talented graduates having to stand outside train stations? It is no wonder the trains are over-flowing and the stations are so busy – based on LinkedIn posts I have to estimate that 50{a990e605127f06bac58d8f530ec8d3ddc1721ced564bd12be3752b381e1e9f7f} of Kings Cross, Victoria and London Bridge at any given time are all unemployed graduates.

Happy Birthdays and Anniversaries

This article is literally writing itself with the amount of rubbish on LinkedIn, and birthdays and anniversaries have got to be included. Realistically, has anyone ever been really happy about an automatic happy birthday or work anniversary message over LinkedIn? Now I say realistically because as anything that is posted over the internet someone will inevitably disagree and say they were absolutely over the moon with a number of congratulations they received, but it is the most unnecessary feature ever. For the social medium that’s supposed to be the most adult and professional, you would think they would strip the website down and keep it simple rather than add an option to say ‘happy work anniversary’. If you can look me in the eye and say, ‘even outside of LinkedIn, I congratulate my friends in person on their work anniversaries’, then I will take this article down, I’ll put my hands up and make a public apology. But we all know that just isn’t something people do.

The man who boasted that he had the most connections on LinkedIn of anybody he knows

Yes, a fully grown man boasted about his LinkedIn connections and he was being 100{a990e605127f06bac58d8f530ec8d3ddc1721ced564bd12be3752b381e1e9f7f} serious.

Okay, that’s taken a decent weight of my chest. There’s definitely more to scrape from the depths of the I-take-myself-seriously-LinkedIn-is-not-Facebook crowd and the like but that’s for another article.

If you’d like to discuss anything ridiculous you’ve seen on LinkedIn, or if you want to discuss front-end development recruitment (my actual job) then feel free to shoot me an email at JP@redcat-digital.com

Written by Jack Prior, Talent Acquisition Manager – Front End Development

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-prior-4a764a127/

Twitter:  @Jack_RedCat  / @RedCat_Digital

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RedCatDigital/

Google+: RedCat Digital

 

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