I think LinkedIn is trying too hard to be more than what it is. It's the professional version of the town church. The town church used to record recording weddings, births and deaths. That's it. LinkedIn should be a record of hirings, leavings, new companies forming and old companies dissolving.
Against the background of that basic information, people should be able to solicit me, freely, to come work for them - but they should be prepared to wait for a response as I'm not going to check in with the 'town church' all that often (unless I'm between gigs or thinking about a new gig).
It might be nice to passively check in on past coworkers to see how their careers are progressing - but that's optional.
I think LinkedIn has a pretty bring future as a business/industry news aggregator which will ride on top of the social platform they've built. Think of it as a BusinessInsider/Forbes/VentureBeat/TechCrunch replacement.
Already you're seeing LinkedIn exclusive editorials by guest writers, and although most of the articles in LinkedIn's feed suck right now, I hope they increase the quality soon (e.g. No more "5 ways to be a successful leader" type articles).
If they can capture quality content and deliver it in the right way then I think that will be successful and fuel more growth in their product and revenues.
I've talked to Reid Hoffman about this, and his answer to what LinkedIn wants to grow up to be is something along the lines of "We've built this social platform which is successful + continues to grow, and that opens up a whole wealth of opportunities to build products/services around it [...]"
I think this is the right path for the company, but what's going to matter is execution. So far they haven't instilled confidence in their execution (What happened to their purchase of Pulse? Their aggregations haven't gotten any better....etc.)
Against the background of that basic information, people should be able to solicit me, freely, to come work for them - but they should be prepared to wait for a response as I'm not going to check in with the 'town church' all that often (unless I'm between gigs or thinking about a new gig).
It might be nice to passively check in on past coworkers to see how their careers are progressing - but that's optional.