Linked In is extremely useful for open source intelligence.

Keep getting hung up on or sent in loops by the automated phone system? Find the engineer at the company on linked in and email them directly

I got my current job through Linkedin, pretty nice one even

Edit: just saying it can work. I hate the garbage on that site otherwise and never logged in anymore until i need to search for a job again

I got several jobs through it. It's good place for its core goal, which is to be found and to look for posted openings.

All the other crap is pointless: posts, discussions, trivia, games etc.

The identity verification is a mixed bag.

It's mostly pointless in the EU because each country has a government body that tracks each ongoing employment contract for the purpose of tax, insurance, credit, work laws, regulations etc. So you really cannot misrepresent yourself.

But there are shenanigans like fake profiles made by bots, or someone putting up a profile pretending to be someone else who may or may not be already on LinkedIn etc. Not sure how you can weed those out without some sort of identity check.

There are however better ways to go about it. For example the EU countries have been (slowly) coming up with benign forms of identity checks.

My country has an online identity platform ran by the government directly, where citizens can enroll voluntarily and use it to perform federated login to other government platforms, and can also see and approve what personal details are shared with those platforms when they do. It's a completely voluntary alternative to the good ol' way of making a different account with every government website. (I'm still floored they had the insight to make something so nice.)

So anyway it hasn't been opened to commercial entities but I could see it be safely used in the future to confirm to a company like LinkedIn that you are indeed a live citizen and nothing else. Just a live API "yes" response with a hash of the citizen ID number; no pics, no data to store.