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How many people do you know that actually use LinkedIn on a daily basis?

I personally don't know a single person that uses LinkedIn other than to occasionally update their profile.   The only time I check my LinkedIn account is to check "alerts", which typically are nothing more than the work anniversaries of people that I either don't care about or don't know.

From a recruiting standpoint there is value in LinkedIn due to the sheer volume of business people on the platform and the ability to possibly connect with those people.   That's where the value of LinkedIn ends and the real challenges of the LinkedIn network begins.

For starters, everyone on LinkedIn carefully curates their profile to look their best.  It's impossible to separate the A Players from the B Players.    It's simply not a true meritocracy.

With no way to identify the performance of prospective personnel on LinkedIn, your best bet is to rely on references.   Refereneces are largely unreliable because prospective employees will naturally obfuscate their weaknesses by providing you the best references they can find, therefore you don't have an accurate depiction of the person you are interviewing on LinkedIn.

On LinkedIn it's also impossible to find out who is in the market for employment, making it even harder to identify new personnel.   Moreover if you want to hire someone off of LinkedIn it's a laborious process that involves contracts, payroll setup/1099 setup, etc.

Upwork (UPWK) Solves The Down Falls Of LinkedIn

Last year I was faced with a major development challenge in a software startup I am involved in:  the Indians that coded our platform wrote really bad code that crashed as soon as people started using it.   Bottom line is that we had to fire the Indian development team.

Who would replace them?  How would we find the replacement?

A friend of mine recommended that I use Upwork.   I had never heard of Upwork but after some research I discovered  that the 2 largest freelancer network in the world, oDesk and eLance, merged to form Upwork just a couple of years ago, thus the new name.

After creating a free account on Upwork I then created my first job posting, which was also free.   That was a major plus for me because both Craigslist and LinkedIn charge money to create job postings.   The job posting process was seamless.

Once I posted my first job, I started recruiting talent myself.   The recruiter tool, which is also free, was extremely easy to use and gave me insights into talent unlike any other platform I've ever used before.