Tell Microsoft: Please Fix LinkedIn
Microsoft’s recent purchase of Linke
dIn raises hope that the new regime will fix LinkedIn. Many people have come to depend on it for their job searches and to promote their businesses. Quite a few are paying hefty fees for Premium accounts. We deserve much better.
dIn raises hope that the new regime will fix LinkedIn. Many people have come to depend on it for their job searches and to promote their businesses. Quite a few are paying hefty fees for Premium accounts. We deserve much better.A profound shift in the philosophy and attitude is desperately needed to make the site more user-friendly. Plus, the site is woefully out of date to serve as the business tool LinkedIn would like us to believe it is.
If you agree, I hope you will join me in contacting LinkedIn/Microsoft to request change. Use the Feedback button on the right side of your home page.
ATTITUDE AT LINKEDIN
Have an idea for how to improve LinkedIn? Rest assured, they will totally ignore you. I’m just one of many who has sent in suggestions for improvements (I’ve sent dozens), many of which wouldn’t be all that difficult to implement. Here's just a couple examples that I believe would improve the user experience. They shouldn't be all that difficult to implement. They illustrate a pattern: extreme lack of responsiveness and interest in improvements.
Give Advance Search Real Database Features: Suppose I want to find someone named John Wryzebeckza who works at Industrious Industries. This is a major corporation with LOTS of people named John--and I have no idea how to spell his name. Why not let me do a search for "John Wr" which is all I know for sure?
Or how about letting me search by state instead of by zip code or Metro Area? I know that John lives in California, but it's a HUGE state with 163,696 square miles. A search by all of California's major metro areas may not find him. Maybe he lives in a small town. Someone who is better at math could calculate the odds of actually finding him with a search by 100 mile radius.
New Job Announcements: I also suggested that LinkedIn give people the option to announce a new job—or not. After losing their jobs, some people do consulting work to keep their heads above water, or say they are doing consulting work to save face. When they add the consulting to their profile, LinkedIn trumpets the "new job," and their network showers them with congratulations. It rubs salt in their wounds to have to tell people that that they actually LOST their job.
One client went ballistic when this happened and sent LinkedIn several angry messages. None were even acknowledged.
LinkedIn's Strange Agenda
LinkedIn has their own strange agenda for site features and improvements, which often has nothing to do with making their site useful for us. For example, they eliminated very popular features like LinkedIn Answers and Signal for no apparent reason. They told us they did it to improve the user experience. Right.
LinkedIn endorsements On the other hand, features that are annoying and of dubious value persist. Case in point: LinkedIn endorsements. Endorsements are those keywords on our profiles that people can click to endorse you for your expertise (as distinguished from “recommendations” where someone actually writes a paragraph or so about you). LinkedIn actively promoted endorsements by regularly presenting us with pictures of our contacts along with a question like, “Does John Doe know about public speaking?”
At one time, I received endorsements every single day, many from people I’d never met. Some endorsers didn’t even live in North America! Once, I even got endorsed for skills I don't claim to have. This endorsement came from a fake profile using the name "Holden McGroyne" (say the name out loud). This ridiculous feature persists because it somehow serves LinkedIn. I’m not sure what it does for anyone else. I certainly would never trust the number of endorsements as an indicator of someone’s competence. This is especially so since I've heard that Endorsement groups have been created in which total strangers endorse each other's skills. So why have this feature?
The site is constantly evolving.
Why isn't LinkedIn's evolution fueled by a passion for finding what would really help us, their customers?
ARTICLE CONTINUED BELOW
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SITE UPGRADE NEEDED
As a business tool, the software is, at times, unbelievably bad. Just one area is the handling of messages.
MESSAGE PAGE
Take a look at the composition of the page where you get messages. Let’s go right to left. 
Paid ads On the far right, taking up one quarter of the screen, are paid advertisements. These make money for LinkedIn; they do nothing for the end user.
Some ideas for conversations appears in the center, taking up half the screen. It contains notices of birthdays, news about connections who got new jobs, and work anniversaries (do YOU care about work anniversaries? People I've talked to say they are utterly irrelevant to them). Since LinkedIn has created powerful incentives to connect with large numbers of total strangers--I myself have thousands of connections—this column usually features news about people I don’t know. So three quarters of the message screen is not useful at all.
My Messages Only one quarter of the screen is devoted to the thing I care about most: communications between me and other LinkedIn members. LinkedIn lumps my incoming messages, outgoing messages, and accepted invitations into this one narrow column. This isn’t a problem for those who only send an occasional message, but if you send lots of them, this column is very confusing and hard to track. According to LinkedIn technical support, there’s no way to separate incoming messages from outgoing. The incoming messages that are most critical to someone in a job hunt or running a business are easily lost. A missed message could mean loss of a job or business opportunity. This is inexcusable negligence on LinkedIn's part, IMHO.
LinkedIn is like the weather
I’ve come to compare LinkedIn to the weather. The weather operates on its own schedule, regardless of our needs. Sometimes it floods, then we get drought, and occasionally a tornado or a hurricane leaves a path of devastation. We never know why. Our requests to the sky for sunshine or rain or no tornadoes get about as much attention as do our requests to LinkedIn for changes and improvements.
That is so unfortunate. LinkedIn has such tremendous potential. It could be so much better than it is—if only management cared. Let's hope--no, let's demand--that Microsoft improve LinkedIn.
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Sep 29, 2016 by
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