[ghaff]

I think people's job patterns varying is part of it. For me, I've mostly stayed at my relatively few jobs for a long time (10 years or more) and every job after the one immediately after grad school have been through people I knew. Others are hopping around a lot more and are more often through recruiters looking for some particular keyword skill.

LinkedIn is pretty useless for the former--except as a Rolodex--but anecdotally can be very useful for the latter.

[virgilp]

I also tend to stay a lot at a given job (e.g. slightly more than 10y at the last one) but still found the current job through LinkedIn. I do 2 things:

1. connect to all recruiters, politely decline with a standard message if obviously not interested

2. when I get a potentially-interesting offer, I reply with "that's all fine and well, but I make <absurdly_high_total_comp> now; do you want to continue the discussion?". (note: I'm not lying).

I used to ignore recruiters at point 1, until I realized it costs me almost nothing to politely decline and earns goodwill; today's junior recruiter that works for a crappy company might be in 10 years the HR director at a company you want to work for. Why not be in touch?

Over the years, this adds up, a handful of opportunities actually said "yes" at point 2, and for one of them I actually went to interviews & got the job (and the very-good-offer).

[ghaff]

Fair enough. If the position is actually relevant (i.e. not obviously scattershot spam--which I do generally just ignore), I'll at least politely decline. And I have had a couple followup phone calls but there wasn't really mutual interest for various reasons.

But, TBH, I'm far enough along in my career in this point and have a sufficiently specialized role (my current job had the description written for me after I started talking to the company) that random recruiting is unlikely to be a fit.

[covidien]

agree - and in the case of the latter it feels like its being permeated by influencer culture, by that i mean (im going to paint with a broad brush here) recruiters and the recruiting industry seems to have exploded and with seemingly non-technical agents. so they naturally gravitate towards shiny things - FAANG positions, hot tech (ex: React), well known schools. outside of power users, its becoming a requirement to play the game if you want to have any success. /oldmanyellsatcloud