Three things that won't:

(1) Certifications: Surely, you think, if you pay $1,000+ (USD) for something, it must actually be worth something, right? Probably not. Anyone can sell you a piece of paper if you're willing to pay for it. They'll sell it to you, one way or another, if you're willing to buy it – what happens next, if anything at all, is entirely up to you. (Trouble is, it was that way to start with.) The market for certifications consists of the (big) number of people who are either out of a job or in a dead-end job and who are therefore presupposed to believe that they can buy their way out of it. They're not going to bypass the opportunity to sell something to you, merely because you're not qualified to buy it. "The outcome," for them, ends when your check clears ... not when you get a job. Yes, there are exceptions to that rule, but not many.

(2) LinkedIn: Sure, the founder of that company is a multi-millionaire, and no doubt a very nice guy and all that, but do you really believe that the cretins you knew in high school way back then, have the power to provide you with a job today? Likewise, do you think that any of them (given that they actually work in the mailroom) actually have the power to chummy-chum-chum up to some hiring manager and recommend to him that they hire you ... such that this person will actually do anything other than request that he quit blocking the elevator? Face it, you can become a comfortable multi-millionaire just by coming up with that idea and "going public" with it ... whether or not it actually works.

(3) Recruiters (most of them): They stand between you and the person whom you actually want to sell to, having no power at all to make the sale themselves. They do this because they've got their hands out for a fat cut of your pay. (Up to 50% of it.) If you want to make the sale, you must make your pitch directly to the person with the "MAP = Money, Authority, and Pain" to hire you. Anyone and everyone else is a waste of time and energy.

Two Things That Will:

(1) A job well done, and done completely, every time: "S/he's not a jackass, and s/he gets the job done, and if s/he can't do it, s/he'll be the first not the last one to tell you." Does that sound so hard? Well, apparently it is. I made good money for a dozen years in Phoenix following-around an insufferable jackass who could be relied upon to leave jobs half-finished. All I had to do was to finish the job, and pass out business cards. People have long memories. I still get contacts from those days. Technical specialists are easy to find. Those that you can actually work with, aren't. People who won't "get going" when "the going gets tough," especially aren't.

(2) An insatiable desire, and willingness, to learn new things: While you can't be "a jack of all trades," also don't be content to be stuck in the one "trade" that you are now in, because the total life-span of the marketability of that "trade" is only a few years. (For instance, "PHP" is already so-o-ooo yesterday. "Ruby" is in. For now. If you want to play that game, better start boning-up on your Haskell. Or something.) The market (especially the recruiter market which still drives a lot of the advertising) has not yet figured out that a human being is actually capable of learning, and of working in, more than one programming-language at a time. This creates an apparent demand for one-shot specialists, who are subsequently cast-away. Therefore: learn more than one thing, and keep doing it. Learn enough, also, that you are able to abstract some of that knowledge – to realize how similar all of these things are, in spite of their apparent differences. It makes a lot more sense for a company to be able to hire one versatile person rather than two self-made über-specialists. There are way too many "silos" in this business already. Don't insert yourself into one.

And, oh yeah, one more: experience. It's way easy to pooh-pooh the idea that, no matter what it is you do, you're going to get better at it the more years you do it ... and that someone who's been doing something for a lot of years is going to accomplish more and to make far fewer mistakes than someone who hasn't made it that far yet. So, if you've actually got the years, go ahead and show them off on your resume ... but, please, without turning it into a CV. (ZZzzzz...) Show the multitude of business-benefits that your accumulated experience has already brought to others, without utterly boring them with buzzwords that nobody understands anymore. Remember, even though the surface features of IT have changed remarkably, the undercurrents have not, and the business-needs certainly have not. They never will. And you, experienced one, know that best.

I agree that certifications in and of themselves are of little value especially in a robust job market. However, in tighter job markets hiring managers have a tendency to need to weed down the resumes they get and one way to do that is to eliminate folks by one criteria or another. Depending on how many you have you might start by weeding out those without experience, then those without degrees and finally those without certifications. Which is to say while the certification alone won't get you the job it is possible it will help keep you in the running if all other (paper qualifications) seem the same. Also some certifications are better than others. One is NOT going to get a RedHat certification by guessing multiple choice questions.

Linked-In if used like Facebook would be useless. I restrict Linked-In contacts to co-workers/managers. Three benefits of Linked-In in job searches:
1) Recruiters do routinely scan through Linked-in to find talent.
2) You can more easily connect with past co-workers/managers to ask if they're still willing to be references for you. People have a tendency to move around and with many people these days not having landlines often the only way to get in touch with such people is through Linked-in.
3) Also many jobs are actually posted on Linked-in.

Recruiters while not being very tech savvy are often your only route in to certain companies. Many large companies not only don't advertise generally for open positions but restrict which recruiters are allowed to place people at their organization. While it is often necessary to educate a recruiter that has reached out to you as to what they should be looking for and/or should be presenting to hiring managers ignoring them as a resource closes many doors in my opinion.

What you wrote sounds much like you're talking about consulting gigs rather than standard full-time jobs so I'm not sure it applies in all scenarios.

LinkedIn starts working when the three things that will get you a job are already there.

With regard to "recruiters," see point #3.

You simply don't realize how hopelessly disadvantaged you are, until you see "your" resume with your personal information stripped off, put in a slush-pile with fourteen (say ...) other identically-formatted resumes. The effects of which you will see, if you ever have the misfortune of being a hiring-manager who has to troll through buckets of that stuff. There's really no way to pick them apart, and if you actually want to interview one of them, your company's going to pay a fee.

I really can't stress this enough: you must go directly to the company who is hiring. You can't be successful if you delegate your sales efforts to someone who doesn't care if they sell you or not ... and who makes you considerably more expensive if you do get lucky.

Also: did you know it costs $10,000 per person per year, or more, to withdraw (up to a certain number of ...) resumes from, say, Monster? Uh huh. That's why it's free to you ... and why Monster Networks is a very profitable publicly-traded company.

You don't need a computer to tell you who your friends are. You don't need to use a computer – let alone pay for a "premium" account – in order to ask them to give you a reference. You need to sell.

Having been both presented by recruiters and having had to wade through the ridiculous rewrites they send I still say you can't ignore them. My last 4 positions all started through recruiters.

As I noted some very large companies (e.g. Fortune 500, Fortune 100) do NOT make their job postings generally available and prefer to work through a select few recruiting companies to get their talent. While the wisdom of companies doing that might be questionable, ignoring the fact that they do that will keep you from knowing about many positions. I've worked for two Fortune 500 and one Fortune 100 companies and all 3 of those jobs went through recruiting agencies. The current job I'm at went through a recruiter and in fact it came to me out of the blue when I wasn't even searching for a job but happened to coincide with me thinking it was time for a change.

I'm not saying knowing people doesn't help. I've certainly gotten jobs by referral by ex-coworkers but on at least one of those it still required me to go through the preferred recruiting agency.

You keep equating Linked-In with Facebook. Some people don't know how to segregate their professional and social lives. As I noted above Linked-In is something I use to keep in touch with ex-coworkers and managers who might not necessarily be "friends". Similarly I seldom put co-workers on Facebook as that is restricted to family and "friends".

It's very interesting to me that we keep using the word, talent.

"Talent," in show-biz, is the people whom you have to put up with because you can't make your movie without them ... and, while some of them are consummate professionals, too-many of them know it.

We currently treat computer-programmers as "talent," lavishing them with money and perks. (I recently saw a req offering a quarter-million dollars a year for a ... Ruby on Rails developer. The job description was unremarkable, and the address wasn't Santa Clara, California.)

We don't teach teamwork. And we don't invest in people. Throughout the business side of IT, we pushed the personnel costs to the other side of the balance sheet, making it a project-linked "short term" capital expense, and probably spending more money that way than we could or should.

I well remember days when companies developed their "human resources," and provided them with real opportunties to grow and to develop within the company as the comapny, itself, grew and changed. I recently consulted with a company whose entire IT staff has been with the company for 15 years. The engagement was to help integrate their system with that of a company they'd acquired, which had an altogether different social dynamic. (All of the developers who had worked on the other company's system had preemptively jumped-ship at the first hint that the company was being sold, therefore taking all of the application knowledge with them.)

I remember the days when employees were "personnel" and not "human resources". I've often commented on the fact that the latter moniker is a joke. If you had "capital resources" you would not dispose of them as readily as most companies jettison "human resources" to try to improve stock price.

There was a reason that for years IBM did NOT do layoffs. They knew that often what you were getting rid of was not just the niche job that you might no longer need but also a wealth of experience not just in specific technical areas but in knowing the organization and its customers. Ultimately stock pricing forced them to start doing layoffs.

One of the issues with large companies is that they do such things that truly cost them in the long run but also create policies that prevent them from getting rid of truly "talent"-less people that can't do their jobs in the first place. Too many organizations these days do employee reviews with the following axioms:
1) You can't get the highest review score possible unless you took a bullet for the CEO of the organization.
2) You can't get the lowest review score possible unless they're already ready to fire you (at which point they don't review you anyway).
The above axioms lead to a lot of mediocrity because it takes away incentives to be exceptional and rewards all but the worst with passing grades.

Lou Gertsner had a lot of interesting things to say about that in Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? ... which is a book that I recommend.

And apparently, Microsoft's getting ready to make that same mistake. Laying off, so it is said, about 18,000 (out of 150,000) people ... "over the next year."

The response of the business world? An uptick in the stock-price, of course. This only three years after cutting 5,800 other jobs. "We'll be so much meaner and leaner when nobody works here anymore."

All, it would seem, because someone in Redmond wants desperately to turn Microsoft into a "cell-phones and tablets" company ... "just like you-know-who" ... more than half-a-dozen years too late. And a "cloud computing" company, no doubt driven by rosy dreams of subscription revenue-streams, even as real companies are facing stronger and stronger scrutiny (and regulation) with regard to just where "their data" is permitted to be.

Of course, Redmond being Redmond, this move simply means that next week there will be 18 new well-funded startup companies, each with about 1,000 employees who know all about what Microsoft is up to, and who are eager to compete against their former boss ... and to beat him, once again.

If it's worth more to the company to have fewer workers, then why shouldn't they layoff employees?

... because they're people, who not only know your business but who actually constructed the underpinnings of it. They have knowledge and skills that are not easily quantifiable. There's more than one case of companies who laid-off thousands of employees who subsequently formed companies that stole key businesses away from them. Dell, for example, decimated itself that way. There have been many others.

Microsoft, in this present case, has utterly lost its way, and seems to be dumping its core business ... the employees are "the core business" ... in exchange for a speculative leap to try to copy what someone in the boardroom thinks is Apple's forte. They're not the first company to have done so nor will they be the last. Right now they are dumping thousands of employees only in a gambit to push up their share-price for the next quarter.

And, as I said earlier, Lou Gertsner had some very interesting things to say about that kind of logic, when he was writing about elephants.

You've now made the point that MS has 'utterly lost it's way', and also that, if fired, MS employees will take the Microsoft Super Sekrit Sauce and go make 'MS killers'. I don't think those two go together too well; if someone was working at MS and knew about the Geese That Lay The Golden Eggs then why would they wait until a layoff to make a 'MS killer'?

All indications are that of the 18,000 or so people due to be sacked by MS, most are from the erstwhile nokia production units. My inference is that most of them are folks assembling phones in a shop. MS will also probably sell these production units (mostly situated outside of the USA in 3rd world countries) to a local business and get them to re-employ the sacked persons on a lower salary. (Re-employing them saves training costs).

Any idea how MS produces the xbox? Do they own the production facilities, people ..?

OK

My point is it seldom is worth more "to the company" and in fact usually has both up front cash costs as well as long term hidden costs. Companies do massive layoffs to improve stock price because brainless analysts equate "less staff" with "more efficient business model".

There certainly are points that laying off staff makes sense but in general it doesn't for the reason I initially cited. One certainly would fault the Wells Fargo of today if it still had a cadre of stagecoach drivers on the payroll. One might not even fault them for laying off tellers in an era when many people do banking on-line or via ATM but then again there ARE times one actually needs to talk to a teller at the local branch. However, simply laying off 1000 tellers to increase your stock price is more apt to cost you customers because they suddenly don't feel served. You'll not be "more efficient" - you'll simply reduce both your costs and your revenues.

I recall several years ago changing banks when they closed the branch nearest me. They said that there was another branch 5 miles away at which point I responded that while that might be true I did my banking choices based on my convenience rather than theirs. (As I write this I recall that the bank I left at the time ended up becoming Wachovia which later merged with Wells Fargo.)