View from the other side. We recently advertised for an Electronics Technician. Our primary posting was on the Gov of Canada jobbank. We linked to it from LinkedIn trying to drive people to the posting that had actual instructions.

What LinkedIn did instead was start accepting applications on our behalf entirely without prompting. Furthermore, we weren’t aware we were getting applications there until we got a message from LinkedIn telling us that we had reached our cap and would have to pay some premium to allow more applicants. The hell…

Also, other sites like indeed.com and such harvested it and were accepting applications, even though we don’t have accounts there and cannot receive the applications.

What do you think this looks like as a job seeker? You just get silence on these applications and think you’re doing everything right, but really the websites are just trying to hold your eyeballs there and don’t actually care if you get a job at all.

Unless the job says something like “we are only accepting applicants via LinkedIn”, assume that your resume is going to a black hole there.

Anyway, we just sent an offer to someone who applied using the instructions we gave on our initial posting on the job bank.