Develop Yourself

#283 - The Practical Guide to LinkedIn for Developers Who Hate LinkedIn

• Brian Jenney

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Grab the templates for posting to LinkedIn here: https://www.parsity.io/learning-in-public

I’ve grown from 0 to nearly 40K followers on LinkedIn with barely any viral posts, and along the way I learned how the platform really works. 

In this episode, I’m breaking down the exact strategy junior developers are using right now to get recruiters to notice them and get hired faster.

So if you’ve hit “Easy Apply” until your fingers hurt and still don't have any interviews, this is for you! 

I’ll show you the simple LinkedIn system that can get you hired without begging strangers for referrals or posting daily “grindset” nonsense.

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Develop Yourself Podcast, where we teach you everything you need to land your first job as a software developer by learning to develop yourself, your skills, your network, and more. I'm Brian, your host. LinkedIn sucks. Let's be honest. It's full of fear-mongers, people with bald heads trying to sell you courses on things you don't really want, and full of AI-generated slop and just cringy stuff from influencers and people that won't shut up. But it's also full of amazing opportunities, really good people that want to lend you a hand, and a whole network of people who basically want to help you reach your goal of getting to a job. So, yes, I know LinkedIn isn't the cool social network, but if your goal is to get hired in 2025, going into 2026, and in general, then LinkedIn's really the only game in town. And I want to go over how you can use LinkedIn as a developer, even if you're really shy, even if you don't get it, even if you hate it, to give you at least a strategy and some tips and tricks that I've learned over the years that are going to help you increase your visibility, get hired faster, and maybe even make a network of people that you actually like and care about. Maybe, just maybe, I can convince you that it's not the terrible, awful platform that you've grown to hate, or even if you can't be swayed in your opinion. At least maybe you'll begin to use it for its true purpose and understand a little bit about the game being played on there. The problem I see with most junior developers and senior developers is honestly, they don't really get LinkedIn, right? This is a social media site masquerading as a job site. And I've spoken with nearly a thousand developers over the phone over the last few years. Yes, I've actually had one-on-one conversations, literal phone calls with many of you listening to this. It's reached about a thousand people so far. I've looked at more LinkedIn profiles than I can even imagine or remember at this point. I've also grown from zero to almost 40,000 followers on LinkedIn with barely a viral post. And at one point, LinkedIn even invited me into a creators program where they paid me money to learn and post with a group of other influencers on LinkedIn. So, yes, I have learned a little bit about how the platform works, and I want to share that with you in the hopes that you can get to your goal a little bit faster, especially if you're on the job market, because I know it can feel brutal. And the reality is there's actually more jobs now than there were two years ago. But the other part of that is it's more difficult to find those jobs because this is a social network and you're using it like you use indeed. So let's go over one of the first things you must fix if you're on LinkedIn. Rule number one, you need to get to 500 connections. This is a bit of a magical number. I often suggest people do this. In fact, my buddy who's on a sales team or was on a sales team, he had to get to 500 connections before they even let him basically unleashed on LinkedIn. Why 500 connections? What is about this magical number? Well, if you look on LinkedIn and how it works, you have first, second, and third party connections. If you have less than 500 connections, or let's say you have like 30, you're essentially undiscoverable. Because what LinkedIn will do is it will allow you to see people in your first, second, and third degree connections. If you only have 30 or 40 or even 100 connections, you're likely not connected to that many people, even in that third tier of connections out there. Getting to 500 essentially means you're connected in some way to basically everybody else in the LinkedIn ecosystem. There used to be this saying back in the days, there's seven degrees of separation between you and Will Smith or something like that. And actually, science and statistics or some analysis has found it's closer to like three or four connections. So if you have a lot of connections on LinkedIn, you're more discoverable. I see a lot of people that are saying, I can't get a job, no one will hire me. And what they're doing essentially is hitting the LinkedIn easy apply and smashing that a million times a day and wondering why they're not getting a job handed to them. Meanwhile, recruiters that actually may want to hire them don't even know they exist because you have barely any connections. And other people that might actually be looking for you, especially if you're senior, have no way of finding you. Now, this next rule, please don't make me think. I've been a hiring manager. I was actually just interviewing people for the current job, which I just left. And I can't tell you how many times, especially back in the past when I was interviewing for junior developer positions, I'd look at a profile and think, did this person make a mistake when they applied? It would be like French Fry Chef, security guard, um, dude that works at some financial institution, not as a developer. Like there'd be nothing in their LinkedIn profile that would say, I'm a developer. Now, I get it, if you have a job and you're nervous about letting your company know that you're looking, I do believe you can have more than one profile. I'm not exactly sure of the terms of service on LinkedIn and whether this is frowned upon or not. But I will say this you're making it really, really difficult for anybody to look at your profile and know that you're trying to be a software developer. And it can create this really weird cognitive dissonance and this mental issue and just be really confusing, honestly. So when you look at somebody and they applied for a job as a software developer, but nothing on their LinkedIn shows that they are a software developer, you kind of just have to move on at that point. So, in your headline, write something like software engineer or front-end engineer, back end engineer, full stack software engineer, pipe, JavaScript, and React. Pipe, pipe, by the way, are those little vertical lines that you can put through there. Look at other developers like Danny Thompson or maybe me, actually, not me, because I have more of an influencer type of profile now. Um, but if you look at other developers out there, look at how they structure their headline and title. It makes it immediately clear who they are and what they're doing and what kind of work and technologies they're using. Now, this is searchable, by the way. So if recruiters are trying to look for you, this title is searchable. And your first experience ideally should be something about software development. If you're a freelance software developer, which I know is kind of a workaround for a lot of people that haven't got their first job to say, hey, I'm a software developer, that is beginning to be less trustworthy than it used to be like five or 10 years ago when it you really could get away with saying that. Nowadays, I might use the word consultant or I would try to get some sort of internship. We've done a lot of this at parsing and it's actually worked out really, really well for a few people. I'm gonna have one guy on the show actually who just got hired. He did an internship and that gave him that credibility in that people could look on his LinkedIn and see a little badge there saying, Hey, I work for some kind of company. So if you need to work for your local church or you need to get an LLC or you need to do something for free for somebody that makes it so your first experience in there is software developer, then you'll need to do that. And that might sound like, well, I don't have time for that or I don't want to do that. Then I'm telling you, it's going to make it a little bit more difficult for you to get that first job and for anybody to trust you and take that initial first step. Now, while we're on the subject of your profile and optimizing it and putting in these keywords, make sure one, that you're putting in these keywords and the exact things that you're actually working on. Two, don't overuse the keywords because if you just put like a laundry list of technology in there of things you barely know, you may come up in more searches, but you're likely gonna raise some red flags or some orange flags to anybody who's worked in tech at all. Even recruiters are gonna say, I don't think that there's any way you could know all these things. So focus on a few core skills that you should have, like JavaScript, React, TypeScript, Node, Express, Python, AI, large language models, whatever. If you're a front-end engineer, then use that title proudly. If you're a back-end engineer, use that title. Full Stack Developer is the most common title nowadays for software developers. So honestly, in my opinion, you should not only be learning full stack, but that should probably be the title that is the safest to have on LinkedIn. But while we're on the subject of that profile, I see this a lot, and this is not a hot take, but maybe it is to you. I don't put the open-to-work green banner on my profile. I don't suggest you do that either. You can actually do this on the under. You can put this up and signal this, but make it only visible to recruiters who are the only people that need to know that you're looking for work. Why does everybody need to know that you're looking for work? I honestly, and forgive me if this sounds a little bit mean, this can look a little desperate. And I don't want you to look like this when you're out there trying to present yourself to the world. The open work banner serves no other purpose than to let random strangers know you're open to work. I can't see how this would help you. And people that are much smarter than me and know LinkedIn better than me are kind of divided, but way more people are leaning on the side of don't put it up. Even the career counselor that we work with through Parsity is basically like, no, don't do that. So I would follow her advice, just don't do it. Okay, this next step. We need to fix your feed. If you are a French fries chef, if you're a security guard, if you're coming from a financial institution, if you're not in tech and your feed is full of non-tech people and you're just kind of randomly adding connections, this cannot work in your favor all the time, right? I told you to get to 500 connections, but I didn't say what kind of connections. So let's dig into what kind of connections you should actually be making. Here is the best way I found to make connections that are probably going to be active connections, people that are engaged in talking online more often. Follow a few big name influencers in the tech space, like Danny Thompson, maybe me, if you're so inclined to do so. Zubin Pratop, who's a buddy of mine who worked with me at Parsity for a while. Um, there's a few others out there. I'm just trying to think. There's John Cricket, there's Nick Cosentino. There's a bunch of really good people out there that talk about tech. And what I would do is put on the bell for notifications when they post. There's a little bell icon next to most of their names or in their profiles, and you can get that notification when they post. And when they do, they typically get people that will comment below their posts. When those people comment, you can either reply or follow those people, or you can be the first one with a comment, a valuable comment, which we'll get into shortly. And then that could actually raise your profile. So we're not even really going to talk about posting because I know from experience that 99% of you will not post. But if you do want to post, I have some LinkedIn templates and you can fill out the form in the show notes below, and I'll just send them over to you for free so you can get it, so you can use those if you do want to write and learn in public. But I'll be honest, after years of telling people to do this, like very, very few people do it, and even fewer stick with it. So I'm not really even going to get into that in this episode because I want to give you practical advice that I think you can actually follow. So now that you're following a few influencers, they're basically like your seed, right? You're gonna go from those influencers, look at their followers, look at people commenting, and then you're just gonna go through and follow like five, 10, maybe 15 or 20 people a day. Maybe you don't need to write a personalized note to everybody. This is not Instagram or other weird social media sites where it would be weird to follow people you don't know. This is totally fine. If you're a dude, don't be creepy. This is a social media site, but at the same time, your name and your employer are attached to your profile. So this often means that you have much more healthy conversation, I will say. But for some reason, it doesn't stop dudes from being weird, and I don't know why. So if you're a woman on here, just be prepared because you are gonna get some creeps on here, guaranteed. So now that you're following these active commenters and things like that, I would really optimize for following the following people: recruiters, engineering managers, active working developers. Here's who you do not want to follow Doom and Gloom Juniors. And nobody hires self-taught devs, nobody hires boot camp grads. These people are often trying to sell you something. And let me be honest, I'm trying to sell you stuff too. Not all the time, but on LinkedIn, that's what I'm doing. Do you want to follow a bunch of people doing that? No, you want to follow people that are talking about technology and not going down this doom and gloom rabbit hole. There are some people that live on LinkedIn to basically be invited to pity parties. There's a lot of pity parties. I've been seeing this for years. In fact, there was a guy that used to fail interviews and write about them, and he got a huge following. I don't know where he is now, but he would post about every failure he had. After the first five, you're thinking, man, what a rough time this person's having. After the next 20, you're thinking there's something wrong with you, right? Now, whether there is or not, he's made his brand as a person on LinkedIn of a failing brand. He's like, I'm the guy that fails every interview. You do not want to be that person. Also, I will say this. One time I was looking up a guy who was going in for an interview for a company where I was working. I saw his LinkedIn profile. It was nothing but negativity about the job market. And at that point, I just decided to skip him and go with another person. Here's the thing: we are looking at these LinkedIn profiles. If you're saying nothing but really negative stuff or saying really awful stuff or mean things, I can't imagine who would read that and then think, let's invite this person in for an interview. And there's even been some people that have said mean things like towards me, and I'm like, I don't know why this would work out for you. I have been in positions where I am hiring, and I can tell you this much, I'm never, ever, ever, ever going to let you come anywhere near a company where I work. Why would I want to subject a team to that kind of negativity? It just doesn't make any sense at all. And our networks are fairly large. You'd be shocked in tech how many people you'll bump into at other companies. In the San Francisco Bay Area, I remember interviewing the same guy twice in the last five years at two wildly different companies. So yeah, you might bump into the same people more than once, and you definitely don't want to leave a terrible impression because on LinkedIn you decided to like cuss somebody out or slide their DMs and say something mean. It's like, what's the point? Here, here's a hot take. Try to be a normal human, which leads me to treat this like social media, not like indeed. So here is an interesting story, right? Um, a hiring manager who had like zero connections, whatever. He had a few, like 30 connections was on LinkedIn. He posts a role and no one sees it, right? On the other side, you have a junior who's applied to a thousand roles. This is like the average person on LinkedIn right now. They've said, I've applied to a thousand places and they can't get a call back. So on one end, you have this manager, like literally a guy that I know and I saw post a role that nobody saw because he has zero connections. And then on the other end, you have people that are applying everywhere and not getting a single callback. There's a visibility mismatch here. And so you have wasted effort on both ends of the spectrum. Remember, social media site, be social. You're going to need to make connections to get visible. We talked about getting that 500 connections, but it's more than just getting the connections. You need to actually engage. And so that doesn't mean posting all the time. And I think this is what turns people off the most from LinkedIn. They think I need to post every other day and talk about what I'm learning. This certainly can work. In fact, there's a student, Jacob, who was on this show earlier this year who got hired, and this was his approach, and it did work for him really, really quickly. I know for the other 99% of people at Parsity and other people that I've met that have been hired, they just didn't do this. So spend maybe 20 minutes in the morning, maybe commenting on people's posts, add five to 10 people maybe a day, and then react like a person, not a robot. If you don't have something interesting or just human to say, just don't do it. Don't try to use AI for this kind of stuff because we can smell it. Humans are really, really good at smelling disingenuousness. And so when you see an AI-generated comment under a post with something that adds zero value, it's not cool, right? It's not going to get you any actual engagement. So ideally, you're following people that actually say stuff that you're interested in, things you have an opinion on, things you have actual questions about. And then it makes it easier to slide in their DMs, right? In the most platonic way possible. Going into their DMs at that point is more like, hey, I saw what you posted. I really liked it. I've actually seen X, Y, and Z and the work I'm doing. Curious, what do you think about this? Or hey, here's an article I think you might like. I saw you were writing about this subject. You want to give to the person before you ask for something, which is what most people do. So when you're doing outreach, here's what most people do. They say, Can you refer me? I can't tell you how many people have just slid into my DMs and just given me their resume. Unasked, no questions, no hi, how are you doing? No compliment, no comment, no, you know, I know you from here or there. Just here's my resume. Can you look it over and give me some feedback? And I just ignore these. It's like big taker energy going on, right? And that's not what humans do. If you were in a party somewhere with your wife or husband or the circle or whoever you're dating, a hamburger perhaps, and you see another person or a circle in this party. What do you do when you go up to them? Do you immediately say, Hey, I heard you work in tech. Here's my resume that I was carrying my back pocket. Give it to me later and tell me what you think about it. See ya. That's gonna be weird, right? You're not gonna be invited back to that party again. Same thing with LinkedIn. So here's a really simple structure I think you can use that I've seen people use with me. This is not a hundred percent guaranteed. People are humans, they're unpredictable. Some people are jerks, some people are nice. Most people are nice. Here's the thing. Mention something specific you may have noticed, whether it's their job, a post they did, maybe an article they wrote. Here's the thing: most other people on LinkedIn aren't writing or posting or doing much else either. So you might need to talk about their job, where they live. Hey, I see you live in Arkansas. I see you live in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I'm also a software developer. Thought it would be cool to connect. I know there's not many of us in this area. Hey, what do you think about the tech scene out here? Where would you recommend I go? I've gone to this meetup in case you're actually curious. You're kind of asking, you're making normal conversation about something that you share a common interest in, which may be your hometown. If you're in a really big city like San Francisco or San Jose or something like that, or New York, this doesn't work as well. But maybe they posted about their kids or something like that. Or maybe you see they work at a company which you really, really like, or you saw them mentioned in some other person's post. Find some way to mention something specific that led you to this point to DM them. And it's okay if it's like, hey, I see you work at this company. I've always really wanted to work there, just wanted to say hi, how are you doing? And if you have any time in the future, I would love to know maybe one or two pieces of advice you would give a new developer about working at this particular company. But either way, very nice to connect with you. See ya. If you ask a short question about their experience, they're much more likely to want to respond rather than something really open-ended or asking, hey, do you want to have like a one-hour coffee chat? Absolutely not. That leaves a lot of room for awkwardness. Developers are not the most naturally, let's say, uh talkative or gregarious people out there, you could say, which is the reason why if you've talked to me or you see the link in the show notes where you want to schedule a call with me, it's only 15 minutes. We're not doing any sales on the call. We're barely getting to know each other on the call. These calls are fairly tactical. I start off the call like this all the time. Hey, nice to meet you. Where are you calling from? Hey, what led you to this call today? Which usually puts the ball on their court and they say, Oh, I wanted to talk about this. Excellent. We talk about that. The 15 minutes is up. If the conversation is going well, or they say, Hey, I know we're at the 15 minute mark. Do you still have time? I always have more time, or I almost always have more time. But the 15 minutes makes it just easily digestible and not so much of a big ask for people. The problem I see a lot of developers have, or a lot of newer developers have, is they say, hey, let's talk for an hour. Absolutely not. 15 minutes, I think, is sufficient. And if you can, have a little link where they can easily schedule it with you. That way there's no muss, no fuss. You get right to it, and now you're making genuine real connections. But you probably are listening to this episode not just because you want to blow up on LinkedIn. You want a job, honestly, right? And yes, people are getting hired through LinkedIn. A lot of people are. In fact, most people that I talk to are getting hired on LinkedIn. Although we have a healthy amount of people in Parsody that are getting hired outside of the LinkedIn bubble. Here's what's not working, though. Blindly playing the LinkedIn lottery and pressing that easy apply button, right? It's like the lottery. It can work. Somebody's going to get rich, somebody's going to hit the jackpot. Will it work for you? Probably not. The reason you're doing networking is because it increases your base rate of getting seen and it increases your surface area for luck. Because at the end of the day, there is some luck involved, right? One person may know another person who may know another person who is hiring. Referrals are always the best way to at least bypass whatever system or AI-generated junk is filtering you out of positions, which you're probably a good candidate for. But you won't even be considered for these if you don't have some connections in the industry. Now, you're going to hear all sorts of advice from all sorts of people. You need to stick to your game plan rather than being swayed by the winds of whatever influencer or random person you talk to on LinkedIn. Remember this everybody has an opinion based on their really limited experience. My experience is still limited too, but I've talked to about a thousand of you out there. I've played the game on LinkedIn and seen how it's worked. I've worked with over a hundred students through Parsity and other programs and seen them get hired. And I'm going to tell you this: you have to have a plan and don't deviate from it because you'll never know if it works. You're likely not getting enough reps in, meaning you're doing one or two applications a day or you're making a couple connections and it's not working out, or you send a few DMs and you don't get some feedback and you think, oh, this isn't working. Until you've done 100 of that thing, you don't have enough data. 100 is a nice solid number to hit. If you're having around 5, 10, 20% success rate, if you're having 20% success rate with your DMs, I think that's good. If you're having around a 1 to 5% success rate with your applications, I think that's probably a decent metric. I think after 100 attempts at something and you have zero luck, then it's time to recalibrate and think, what am I doing wrong? Do I need to reach out to Brian? Do I need to reach out to somebody in my network to figure out what's going on? But if you've only done 10 of that thing, you just don't have enough data. So to wrap it all up, fix your freaking profile, have a picture in there, have a headline that lets people know what it is you do that you're a software developer. Remove the word junior or aspiring or all those kind of words, which basically say, hey, take a chance on me, and then have some sort of experience that directly points to you being a software developer. And if you don't have that experience, work your hardest to go get that experience through an internship, freelance, or some sort of volunteer opportunity. Get to 500 connections, connect with people and make genuine connections and don't offload everything to AI. Do commenting and DMs to people that you actually find interesting, talking about things that you want to talk about and try to keep conversations limited to 15 minutes or so so you don't scare off potential people that actually want to help you out. And always give first before you take when you're DMing a stranger when possible. Try to avoid the naysayers, all the doom and gloomers, which I know are really prevalent on LinkedIn, and they can really warp your reality. The algorithm will do its best to feed you things it thinks you're interested in. So like, comment, and share things that you actually like rather than looking for pity party posts, because then you're just gonna get more of that, and it can really warp your mind and your view, and you can think that that reality is your reality. And very lastly, in the show notes, I have a form where I'll send you a template full of posts you can use on LinkedIn. These are based on some of the things I've posted over the years. I've written over a thousand things on LinkedIn since I started. Some have gone semi-viral, many have not, but it's the consistency over the years that has taken me from zero to nearly 40,000 followers, which has really changed my life in many ways and helped me run a business, make money online, and do all sorts of other things and meet people that I have no business talking to at all, some of which I've even brought on this show. If you're interested in that aspect of LinkedIn, then you should probably follow somebody like Justin Welsh, who really knows the game of LinkedIn and selling, or Darren McKee, who can show you how to sell on LinkedIn. I'm not on LinkedIn to really sell anything at this point. I use this podcast to reach viewers and listeners that might want to join Parsity. And I do some of that on LinkedIn as well. But honestly, I've always enjoyed writing even as a kid. And even though I couldn't be a writer, I thought, well, maybe I can cosplay as one by writing hot, spicy posts on LinkedIn or Substack or Medium where I write much longer articles and things like that. Anyway, I really hope you found this helpful. Pick up those templates in the show notes. And if you want me to do another episode where I go into the game of how you make money from followers without ads, without sponsors, without promotions, I don't do any of that, but I've made a lot of money over the years from posting on Instagram, other places, because I learned the game of how to get attention and turn that into money. If you're interested in that kind of thing, I'd love to break it down because it is fun to talk about, but it's definitely outside of my normal developer advice stuff. Anyway, hope you found that helpful and I'll see you around. That'll do it for today's episode of the Develop Yourself podcast. If you're curious about switching careers and becoming a software developer and building complex software and want to work directly with me and my team, go to parsity.io. And if you want more information, feel free to schedule a chat by just clicking the link in the show notes. See you next week.

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