yes, this is really worrying. linkedin is indeed useful, but it's also creepy as hell. mainly because in some sectors, specially software, there is really strong pressure to join. i never did and now that i'm practically retired i think i got away with it. but their recruitment policy is also truly jerk level. i still get a lot of invitations from people without them even knowing! (at least that's what they used to say when i contacted them about it, now i don't even bother anymore, i just plonk it).
I thought about Google+ (when I bought a smartphone, which to be fair hardly gets used for anything other than calls and texts, their policy was to auto-create an account for you; I deleted it), but nobody I know actively uses it. I think I'm a dinosaur who prefers to call, or to spend time with people, or - if there's no other option - to e-mail. That approach used to make me very unpopular in the office, where everyone, even folks two desks away, wanted the "email by default" approach, and slated me for my refusal to sign up to the office social network, use instant messaging, or have a shareable Outlook calendar.
Fortunately I'm not in the IT industries at all, but it's worrying that the job centre have zero respect for privacy. I admit that since I was last signing on as unemployed (a little under 20 years), the way people apply for jobs has totally changed and it has taken me longer than I'd like to adapt - to "applicant tracking software", for instance, which sounds creepy as heck even if it's totally innocuous. For instance, most of my background is in administration, but until last week my CV didn't contain the words "administration", "administrative" or "administrator" - if read by a human, it would be obvious, but apparently this software is just a dumb keyword search, and I'm led to believe that applications don't get read unless the software passes them, so it all gets overlooked.
I'm told Linked In works best if you have a network of ex-colleagues on there who'll recommend you to recruiters, vouch for your skills, etc. - so that's a problem straight out of the gate. Kind of makes me wish I was 20 years closer to retirement, instead of competing with people 20 years younger than me for entry-level work... I'm slightly too old to be a "digital native" or a millennial, too young to walk away.
But yeah. Bottom line? I find social networking and the way the internet largely runs these days to be creepy as all heck, and object to things like my phone GPS-tracking me and reporting it to a company in the north-eastern US whose motto is "don't be evil" (because that seems pretty evil to me, or at least pretty Orwellian).
Could be worse. They're not Kafkaesque yet.
The job centre, on the other hand...
Do I sound like a cantankerous old fool? I just think there has to be a better way, and kind of miss how the world was before everyone had laptops and WiFi.
