It's certainly true that LinkedIn is the go to for white collar professionals seeking to make their resumes visible passively to recruiters. But isn't life still easier with LinkedIn than in the before times, when recruiters would dig deep to get folks' phone numbers and then have to call each of those people individually? (I think the modern equivalent would be email addresses.)
It's true that LinkedIn makes recruiting much easier to scale to a mass market. And it's also true that it has a monopoly on that scaling for professional employees. But is it fair to call them an economic termite when it's still possible to do sourcing in an admittedly clunky and old fashioned way? Just because they have a monopoly on scaled recruiting doesn't mean that they hold all the cards the way Linde (also in the profile) would in the gas market. This is particularly borne out by the existence of Indeed or Stack Overflow as options for posting your resume for recruiting.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. It's not the point. Lawyers tend to puff their smokescreens, convincing people antitrust agenda is difficult. It isn't. Once you start eating a certain amount of the pie, the rules of the game change for you, and you only, because you become too strong, causing imbalance and threatening stability.
I'm sure LinkedIn's legal department employs an army of antitrust specialists frequently dealing with accusations from their competitors. That's a good thing.
There's one position you never wanna be in: When you don't have a choice, and it doesn't matter whether you're a company or an individual. Autodesk is one prime example of a long-term nasty sales behavior significantly distorting the market. Last but not least, democratic governments around the globe have been failing to enforce these laws, not to mention these are in many cases too permissive in the first place.
I wouldn't use Stack Overflow as an example of the market not being viable. 2022 SO had a horrible reputation problem, and their main value proposition (that is, qualifying the candidates) used a metric that was completely broken and probably counterproductive in practice (but we can't know that one for sure).
It's certainly true that LinkedIn is the go to for white collar professionals seeking to make their resumes visible passively to recruiters. But isn't life still easier with LinkedIn than in the before times, when recruiters would dig deep to get folks' phone numbers and then have to call each of those people individually? (I think the modern equivalent would be email addresses.)
It's true that LinkedIn makes recruiting much easier to scale to a mass market. And it's also true that it has a monopoly on that scaling for professional employees. But is it fair to call them an economic termite when it's still possible to do sourcing in an admittedly clunky and old fashioned way? Just because they have a monopoly on scaled recruiting doesn't mean that they hold all the cards the way Linde (also in the profile) would in the gas market. This is particularly borne out by the existence of Indeed or Stack Overflow as options for posting your resume for recruiting.