Tag: linkedin

Weekends

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

The weekend was pretty good. I am definitely feeling better than I was last week. On Sunday I woke up at 7:45, which is unusual for me recently – usually I’m awake at more like 6:00.

Sunday was mother’s day (in the UK, don’t worry, Americans) and I bought her a little ‘bee hotel’ which is a little wooden thing filled with little wooden tubes where supposedly bees and insects go and live. She has to work out what to do with it now. It has a string on the top to let you hang it from something but we think it would be better on the ground. It needs anchoring so it won’t get blown around. She has some ideas about trying to build something around it to accommodate wildlife too, but I’m not sure what that will look like at the moment.

Sunday was also half marathon day, just because I felt like it. I hadn’t planned it. I got to 14km and thought “why not?”. I haven’t run that far since the last half I did in September (which was disastrous). My left leg has felt heavy today but nothing too bad.

I think I might have a break from job seeking for a bit. The recruitment sector as a whole is icky. I had a recruiter email today with the message “Thanks for the application you’ve made to the role I have online. Could you let me know when you’re free to speak, and what number to call please?”. 🙄

I’ve had two more email me with roles that are supposedly working from home 3 or 4 days a week, but they haven’t even bothered to tell me where they are based! As if that’s some minor detail. Well it’s in Penzance but you only need to go there twice a week, which is pretty much never, so it’s not important really. And don’t get me started on LinkedIn. It’s 50% a recruitment site and 50% Facebook for awful people. Every time I log in and see the main page I feel like I need to go and have a shower.

LINKEDIN DRAMA

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been getting some interest from recruiters since signing up to LinkedIn last week but I haven’t really been paying much attention to it. For whatever reason I felt more settled at work this week so it seemed less important. I have one chat going with a recruiter which I think is going to fizzle out soon with him accepting he doesn’t have anything I’m interested in at the moment, and I have another I declined because it would need to me to drive to their office, which is less appealing than taking the train. If I was desperate I’d go for it, but I’m not. There’s another one that looks like a possibility but under the desirables, it says “pre-existing security clearance”, so I think I’ll skip that one.

So that’s all OK, but today I got a notification on there saying “Someone at [my old company] viewed your profile”. That just made me panic. I don’t even know who it was because it doesn’t say. I am definitely not over that job. This is why I didn’t want to be on LinkedIn. It connects me to somewhere I don’t want to be connected to.

So. I went and blocked a few people I definitely never want to speak to again, which means they can’t see my profile at all. I forget the aliases I used to refer to them as now. One was Becky, obviously, since she was the reason I left. Another was Mike, who I kind of used to be friendly with but he wasn’t exactly supportive or trustworthy. Mike would say pretty nasty things about Becky behind her back, but to her face he was the the total opposite and seemed to want her attention, which I found irritating. Things cooled, well, froze when she repeated something I’d said to him in confidence. I later learnt that he’d actually said quite a lot of things. He seemed to think he was a friend but he was one of those “with friends like these, who needs enemies?” kinds of people. My counsellor described him as ‘leaky’ and suggested that when he learnt something he tried to use that knowledge to get people to like him because he was insecure (which he definitely was). Probably true.

So anyway… as I went on his profile today to block him, I read the summary he’d written about himself and thought it seemed familiar. I unblocked and went back to Becky’s profile. Yes, he’s literally plagiarised her summary paragraph. It’s about 100 words long and all he’s changed is the job title. He’s also left her a comment on a post she’s shared saying that she is “lovely”. Which is a totally normal thing for a man to write on his married co-worker’s social media, right?

Anyway… they are blocked now so that’s the end of that and hopefully I’ll feel a bit less on edge about LinkedIn knowing that they won’t be able to see that I exist on there.

Everything hurts

~ e.v. ~ 7 Comments

Well, not everything, but lots of things do. My foot is twinging again, my wrist/hand is twinging as well (carpal tunnel?), my hamstrings are a pain in the bum (literally) and my hip is still not really feeling OK. Last night when I was lying in bed my lower back felt soooo tight.

I haven’t run since last Saturday and I seem to be in worse state now than I was then. I guess that’s not incredibly surprising. Muscle imbalances often don’t sort themselves out and muscles and tendons like to be worked. And the fact I sit down all day isn’t good. My hip flexors get tight and that’s why my hamstrings hate me right now. I’m going to start running again tomorrow (but only gently) and hope for the best.

Earlier today I got caught in the trap today of looking at the “people you may know” thing on LinkedIn. It was really bad for my mood. I knew LinkedIn was a bad idea. Anyway… I added a rule in my ad blocker to hide those suggestions. I was quite pleased with myself for that.

LinkedIn

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

After two working days on LinkedIn, I’ve had 7 profile views, one connection request from a recruiter, one phone call from another recruiter and one other recruiter contact me with a job spec (not really interested, the company is in London though the job is supposedly remote). So overall I’m feeling content about this. There seems to be enough around that something should pop up at some point without me needing to concentrate much effort into it.

LinkedIn is a weird place. It’s trying to get me to connect with people it thinks I know. The strangest one is someone who I very briefly met about 8 years ago. He was also hired when I started my previous job, but he only lasted about 6 weeks. He was a student in London at the time and working part time and remotely, so, unsurprisingly, he hasn’t listed it on his profile. But how did LinkedIn match us? Very odd. All I can think is that he used to have it on his profile and LinkedIn has maintained the link to our ex employer even after he removed it? I don’t know. LinkedIn is a bit sinister really.

I don’t really like that it’s trying to match me with people from my previous employer. I don’t want to feel ‘connected’ to that place in any way. I think LinkedIn is a mental health black hole if you’re not careful. I’ve set up some job alerts by email and I’ll try to limit my interaction with the website until it emails me with something relevant.

The recruiter I spoke to asked me what I was earning now and then said “did you take a pay cut at your current job?”. Which made me think. I didn’t, it was actually a decent jump, but when they offered it to me they had already asked how much I was earning, and I do think they took advantage of the fact I was massively underpaid to start with. I knew that at the time and overlooked it because it got me away from my previous job and it was still an upgrade, so I’m not resentful of it, but that doesn’t mean it’s a situation I should continue indefinitely.