[Spooky23]

LinkedIn is like baseball cards when I was a kid.

There’s two metrics for dick-measuring contests, size of network and quality of network. Linkedin is there to show, yeah I’m a badass who got the <insert big shot here> to link to me, or look at me, I have lots of cards.

There is some actual stuff happening there, but the bread and circus that brings the crowd are those two metrics.

[Diederich]

Huh. I have never heard anyone brag about the size of their linkedin network.

[olympus]

LinkedIn network size is almost treated as a binary big/little category to recruiters, because after 500 connections it just shows "500+" instead of the actual number of connections.

So a recruiter sees "500+ connections" and thinks, "this person is serious about [finding a job/networking with professionals/staying connected with colleagues]," or the recruiter sees "79 connections" and thinks, "this person is only on LinkedIn as a formality."

It's not really something to brag about and if you're a perfect fit for a job I doubt your network size will keep you from getting hired (unless you are in a social-heavy career like marketing). But, if you've got 475 connections it's probably worth it to send out 26 more random connection requests to get past past 500 and into that space where the recruiter doesn't know exactly how big your network is.