Per *month*?
Mar. 8th, 2011 10:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurI just got a come-on from LinkedIn, offering me one month free of their "premium" service. Of course, I know the pusher-in-the-playground business model perfectly well, so I'm not signing up for anything without a little more research, but it did make me curious.
I go to the LinkedIn homepage, which I pretty much never use: I'm a passive consumer of LinkedIn, treating it as a useful Rolodex and accepting connections from people I know, but not doing much with it. I look around a little, and am immediately struck at how hard it is to find *prices* anywhere. Indeed, I can't find the prices listed on any page that I can access without logging in and selecting the "upgrade" button.
Boggle.
The plan they're trying to push at me costs $40 per month? Seriously? I mean, $40/year is around what I was expecting, and I might even think about it if I actually used LinkedIn much -- the tool would be mildly useful if I was job-hunting and didn't have as good a personal network as I do. But $500/year is pretty outrageous -- and moreso considering that that's only the middle-tier plan. (Yes, really: there's one that's even more expensive.)
I repeat: boggle.
Does anybody actually subscribe to this? I suppose headhunters probably do, and I can see it being worth the investment for them. But I'm hard-pressed coming up with a reason why anyone else would. Is it priced to take advantage of the desperately unemployed? I guess that makes sense -- they're probably targeting people who are actively job-hunting, and pricing it on the assumption that they will pay almost anything for a month or three until they find a job, and then drop it again...
I go to the LinkedIn homepage, which I pretty much never use: I'm a passive consumer of LinkedIn, treating it as a useful Rolodex and accepting connections from people I know, but not doing much with it. I look around a little, and am immediately struck at how hard it is to find *prices* anywhere. Indeed, I can't find the prices listed on any page that I can access without logging in and selecting the "upgrade" button.
Boggle.
The plan they're trying to push at me costs $40 per month? Seriously? I mean, $40/year is around what I was expecting, and I might even think about it if I actually used LinkedIn much -- the tool would be mildly useful if I was job-hunting and didn't have as good a personal network as I do. But $500/year is pretty outrageous -- and moreso considering that that's only the middle-tier plan. (Yes, really: there's one that's even more expensive.)
I repeat: boggle.
Does anybody actually subscribe to this? I suppose headhunters probably do, and I can see it being worth the investment for them. But I'm hard-pressed coming up with a reason why anyone else would. Is it priced to take advantage of the desperately unemployed? I guess that makes sense -- they're probably targeting people who are actively job-hunting, and pricing it on the assumption that they will pay almost anything for a month or three until they find a job, and then drop it again...