Next month marks the 23rd anniversary of the launch of LinkedIn, the most awful of all the social media networks. It used to be about business. These days it’s a parallel universe where the sort of nonsense you once shared with your family and close friends on Facebook – births, deaths, marriages, attention-seeking ‘U OK HUN?’ sad selfies, angry rants, happy birthday messages, saccharine memes and cryptic quotes are chewed up and regurgitated into smug self-promoting drivel or, worse still, marketing blurb.
I was made redundant in November and the worst thing about the past five months has been having to go on LinkedIn. Naively, I believed I could upload my CV, apply for some jobs, get a job, and get on with my life. But no. I was blissfully unaware that the game has changed since I was last unemployed. LinkedIn has mutated into an all-you-can-eat BS buffet, one that can only be endured by either the deluded and the desperate.
Let’s start with the latter. It’s impossible to spend more than four minutes on LinkedIn without encountering someone screaming into the abyss about how they’ve been laid off and are losing their hair, home or will to live – please, please, please can you share their rambling sob story with your network?
There’s an undertone of threat with these posts: if you don’t help get their update to 10,000 likes, you will suffer a similar fate – ending up in the gutter, your dignity a distant memory too. It’s the modern-day equivalent of an angst-inducing chain letter. As for the former, the deluded, the ones who actually enjoy spending hours a day in this hellscape – I call them the LinkedInfluencers.
They’re a relatively new genus of social media wanker (professionally referred to as a B2B influencer, vom) who bark out soundbites that would make even the most obnoxious wannabe from The Apprentice shudder. They spout inanities like ‘a Lamborghini in the jungle isn’t useless. It’s just misplaced’, and give themselves atrocious, nonsensical job titles such as ‘Wisdom Activator’, ‘Marketing Magician’, ‘Learning Architect’, ‘Word Tamer’. David Brent would be proud.
The ones that haven’t quite made it to the top of the ‘I’m getting paid big bucks to be an insufferable business bore’ pyramid treat LinkedIn like OnlyFans, trawling the site for subscribers. They beckon you over to their profile with a whisper of ‘Follow me for more insights’. They want you to sign up to their newsletter. They’re hawking their ‘Ultimate LinkedIn Growth Playbook’ (don’t get too excited – it’s a PDF they made in Canva), they’ve got a podcast about being a Sigma male. The next episode is about what Peaky Blinders character Tommy Shelby can teach you about email marketing strategies. Well worth a listen, mate.
These self-appointed ‘thought leaders’ invent problems so they can solve them in word-salad bullet points (but no boring dots on lists here please – it’s emojis only), busy themselves hyping up everything dull about modern office life, from cloud servers to payroll management systems, and generally spew absolute drivel about themselves.
It’s impossible to spend more than four minutes on LinkedIn without encountering someone screaming into the abyss
To game the site’s algorithm, they share statements which veer from fantasy to blatant fiction, ask ridiculous questions to annoy people, get you to waste time on meaningless polls, and loiter on other people’s pages, flooding the comments on high-performing posts with ‘sharing for reach’ and ‘would love to connect’. How do they have time for a job? Or is LinkedIn their fulltime job? What makes their big bold ‘this industry is broken’ posts even more loathsome is that most of the time they’re clearly written by ChatGPT.
Some of the LinkedInfluencers class themselves as ‘digital nomads’, offering their ‘services’ (usually some sort of baseless ‘online mindset coaching’) during the two hours they work a day. I imagine them sitting on a beach in some country where their family money stretches further, typing these inane comments from a sun lounger.
If you’re married or in a long-term relationship but have always wondered what it’s like to be ghosted, this is something you can experience on LinkedIn thanks to the army of mannerless HR drones and headhunters who treat the site like Tinder for the jobless. I have long held a theory that there are three types of people who can lie as easily as any psychopath: magicians, estate agents and recruiters. And now I am confident that at least a third of my hypothesis is correct.
So the next time an interviewer asks me ‘Why do you want this job?’ I’m going to be honest. I just want to get off LinkedIn. ‘Please,’ I’ll weep. ‘Help me escape the human zoo!’ And if that doesn’t work, I guess I will just have to admit defeat and post a maudlin tale of woe on LinkedIn… will you share it with your network? Please?
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