LinkedIn Annoyances

Looking for a job is always hard. Sometimes it seems like there are so many opportunities, but so few options. It’s a daunting task, and there’s no shortage of websites out there purporting to help. One of the biggest, if not the biggest, is LinkedIn. It’s a Facebook-like social network tailored to business networking. The idea makes a lot of sense, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. There are a lot of little LinkedIn annoyances that make the service a chore to use. Here are my biggest pet peeves.

Excessive Emails

This is the number one complaint about LinkedIn, if only because it affects people who don’t use the service. LinkedIn makes it very easy to spam your email contacts, including those who want nothing to do with the service. But even if you do use it, LinkedIn still sends you update emails out the wazoo. You can control most of them under your profile settings, but the defaults are always set to send you more emails. So every time you join a new group on LinkedIn, you need to manually tell it not to constantly tell you what’s going on in the group.

Odd Notifications

Maybe I spend too much time on Facebook, but I’ve gotten used to Facebook’s notification system, and LinkedIn’s just feels “off”. For example, if one of my friends gets a new job and I “like” their status, LinkedIn will inform me later that 12 other users also “liked” it. This is not pertinent information to me. I’m happy for my friend, but I can barely keep track of my own social media likes, much less others as well.

Job Anniversaries ≠ Birthdays

LinkedIn knows how long you’ve been at your current job, and automatically tells your friends every time you celebrate your “job anniversary”. But here’s the thing: job anniversaries are not something that people normally celebrate. Your work may acknowledge your anniversary with a certificate, but outside the Human Resources department, it’s not a big deal. In addition, people often neglect to update their job history until the need arises. So you get people celebrating “work anniversaries” at jobs they haven’t had in years. That wouldn’t be such a big deal if LinkedIn didn’t default to automatically post life events.

What are your biggest LinkedIn annoyances? Have you had any luck finding work with LinkedIn? Let me know about your experiences in the comment section.