Linked in

[EverybodyWantsTo]

A lot of my colleagues seem to be on there now. I'm pretty certain I want to stay teaching in HE for the foreseeable future, so is there any point to being on it as HE recruitment is always application based?

I guess what I'm asking is, are you on there, and what do you get out of being on there?

I've always seen it as useful for the kinds of jobs that involve recruiters (DH is in finance and has been approached through his profile) but not HE, but maybe I'm missing something?

No one? Guess I'm maybe right that it's not that useful for academics then!

I don't see many in there. Tend to use Research gate and ORCID and other modes, especially for sharing research.

I like to use it for career updates from colleagues and also developments in my field. Definitely doesn’t work as a recruiting tool for academics.

I haven't looked by LinkedIn in 10+ years but I know colleagues in engineering who use it more.

Bluesky has a good and growing academic community in neuroscience that I enjoy. And also some on mastodon. Both are taking the place of twitter for academic chat and sharing jobs and papers.

The academics I work with use it to post about conferences and similar activities. They find it useful for profile raising I guess. (Business, marketing etc).

I have heard some unis/institutions are leaving X/Twitter and planning to use Instagram and LinkedIn instead.

I first saw my current post on a notification from Linked in - I wasn't expecting it as a possibility at all so would definitely have missed it otherwise. I still like looking at the job notifications - just in case. I also keep in touch occasionally with former colleagues through Linked in. I don't have a huge number of contacts though. Otherwise I like ResearchGate.

I'm not on linked in, but lots of my colleagues are (business school). It's useful for links to industry (very relevant for us obviously) and general profile boosting and networking. Not so much recruitment.

Oh that's interesting. Maybe I should dip my toe in then.

Hearing about relevant conferences would be useful too.

Among my colleagues and collaborators there has been a big shift away from Twitter to Linkedin. I'm also part of a network for researchers in my field, we're also shifting our social media presence to LinkedIn.

I don't use it very actively, but when I look it seems mostly self-advertising (new papers, reports). It does seem useful to connect to non-academic stakeholders. Many (now-graduated) students have also connected with me which can occasionally come in useful when I'm looking for an industry/civil society organisation to partner with or to invite a guest speaker for example. Sometimes the graduand is in a position to do this, or they sometimes connect me to their colleague or manager.

A lot of institutions in my field are moving on to LinkedIn now because Twitter is so toxic, and also because engagement on Twitter is about 10% of what it was 2 years ago. So LinkedIn is becoming the new venue for sharing recent research.

Bluesky has also taken off in my area in the last few months, but it's mostly individuals at present rather than institutions. I think there's more inertia preventing institutions moving from Twitter and they're worried about losing followers if they leave entirely (even if most Twitter followers these days are bots).

I was in conversation with a recruitment agency who do a lot of work in HE about a fortnight ago. Yes, it’s largely for senior positions, but they said that they absolutely use LinkedIn a lot, and that having this up to date is hugely important from their perspective.

I don't know any academics who would rely on LinkedIn for getting recruited.

I am going to start another thread, though, about successors to Twitter.

Thanks, that's a good idea.

@AlwaysColdHands that's interesting. I'm at Reader level but not sure if recruitment agencies are used below prof/director/dean type stuff? I've only recruited for reader level and below myself and we've only ever done direct adverts.