Must have . . . LinkedIn?
Check this line out I received from a mouth-breather blindly spamming developers:
Ideal Candidates will have REST or RESTful web services, Spring, Linux OS and a Linkedin Profile.
Woah. Since when did having a LinkedIn profile become a necessity for being a developer?
More companies are coming out with pre-screen personality tests, requirements to obtain your contact lists and social media requirements — for instance something I mentioned before, where a company said it owned any contacts I made while on my gig — phone, email, social media. No shit. I didn’t sign any of that.
Jeff Atwood, Co-founder of Stack Overflow, opted out of LinkedIn years ago questioning the benefactor of such a site. I have an account but I barely use it. I do know some, very few, developers who *have* benefited from LinkedIn; and many are on Google+ now. I also know that recruiters want access to contact lists and have reports they run on LinkedIn data to see if positions open up or companies have activities that may indicate sales opportunities.
I certainly am not hooking up just any strange sales person to my linked in account even if I had 1000 job leads. For years I’ve gotten spam out of the blue to hook up with strangers on LinkedIn.
Most of the developer groups I’ve seen on it are started by recruiters; if they throw an event it would be best to show up to this in person and network in person. That’s how it works for me.
Anyway, I see this as a major “data mining” flag when a company emails out a LinkedIn requirement. Although it doesn’t say you have to network with them . . .and I wouldn’t.