Nik on Linkedin
LinkedIn is a social media platform for professionals. I joined in the late-2000s, my earliest gmail email from linkedin.com was dated 2006-08-18, although I also used to use another email address at the time.
I have a lot of friends in Tokyo who worked as headhunters, and there was no Japanese interface for LinkedIn back then. This actually made it a treasure trove for headhunters in Tokyo, as all of the Japanese professionals listed on it back then were essentially pre-filtered by their ability to use English, at least at the level of an internet application. So it was easy picking for them when looking for bilingual professionals in Tokyo.
I cannot remember if Microsoft bought LinkedIn first or LinkedIn bought lynda.com first, but I remember being a little disappointed with the user experience with LinkedIn Learning initially. I thought it was similar to the degradation in quality that I experienced with both Hotmail and Skype after Microsoft bought them. However I have to say that these days LinkedIn Learning is quite good.
I enjoy the professional tone in posts and comments on LinkedIn compared with other social media platforms. I will make an exerted effort to make more use of it going forward.
One issue I've had was I noticed my Creator mode was off, and when I clicked on it, I was surprised to see that I've failed to abide by their community policy guidelines, or have made an egregious violations in the last 12 months, or or it's LinkedIn bug.
The criteria for using Follow tools is as follows:
- You have abided by our Community Policy Guidelines
- Your account is more than 48 hours old
- You have no spam flag in the last 30 days
- You have no egregious violations in the last 12 months
I looked for emails from LinkedIn concerning notifications of violations, but I cannot find anything.
Open To
LinkedIn has a convenient feature to notify people of your primary purpose on LinkedIn, broken down into three categories: Finding a new job, Hiring, and Providing services. Honestly, I feel like they could use a fourth, Looking for Investment. I understand the potential risks with this, however, I sort of feel like the connections in Linkedin could add the trust-element that would prevent Ponzi scheme style fraud.
- Finding a new job
Show recruiters and others that you're Open to work
- Hiring
Share that you're hiring and attract qualified candidates
- Providing services
Showcase services you offer so new clients can discover you
- Looking for Investment (← My idea, not on Linkedin yet)
Having an existing opportunity to get in on the ground-floor
Adding Media to Work Experience
LinkedIn provides the ability to add media to work experience, however, they haven't really figured out how to integrate this with their native video hosting platform. The result is that YouTube links show nice thumbnails and yet their own videos are ugly, unless you upload them again. My rant about that:
After recording this, I did learn that you can manually change your thumbnail, so I guess there is a workaround. But it is important that it is categorized as a workaround, because it is not by any means intuitive.