LinkedIn, once a great professional networking site has become today Facebook light. Engagement drives your feed, content creators have been come a theme. What used to be discussions and sharing ideas has tuned into Facebook, arguments over one way or the other. Always the person writing is absolutely the only one in the room that is right. Other opinions and experiences don’t exist to the authors of the post.
Suddenly if you don’t have a 10 year old LinkedIn profile you get branded a bot, a fake account. No one thinks that for 17+ years I held two jobs. I had no reason to network and my job wasn’t about creating new ideas to share with other companies. So why would I have a LinkedIn account? It served no purpose in the scheme of my work or life. But create an account when you need to, after having your job eliminated and suddenly you’re a bot. Or not “professional enough” since you weren’t there anyway.
When I shared by posting on any site, I’m not stating how I expect things to be. I am sharing what I see through the process. My experience will not match yours often. No two every flow through any system the same way twice.
Even on LinkedIn the majority of discussion is Application Tracking Systems and Artificial Intelligence. These are both creating problems for all sides. They argue back and forth who is at fault, never reaching any goal towards a unified solution.
First can we please get things right. Artificial Intelligence is NOT here yet. What we have is programmable Large Language Learning Models. This so called AI is nothing more than writing a script to determine outcomes based on what is given to the LLM. It pattern matches based on your script definition. We then create a script allowing it access to our systems and perform tasks we would usually be doing with our own hands. It is not intelligent and it is not making decisions for anyone.
So how can anyone call this a professional site anymore. My best guess is currently 90 plus percent of posts come from either recruiters, hiring managers and those unemployed. All giving advice how each other can fix the problem they caused. Unemployed blame ATS, recruiters and hiring managers. Recruiters and hiring managers blame the unemployed applicants. Each saying do this to fix “your” problem.
Now coming into light are all the “expert advice”, charged for of course that will teach you how to AI proof your resume. Of course there is no agreement other than paying them, where you can hold them accountable for realized results. This will lead to you spending more money and no results coming your way.
Do we call this progress?
Yet, if you share your experience comments automatically defend saying it is your fault. No one knows how to take feedback anymore.
Two groups have been massively hurt during the LinkedIn transition. People looking for work and people trying to build companies.
I have several friends who built their business on LinkedIn. Today they rarely use it. I see this trend everywhere. Networking used to aid those looking for work find jobs they were qualified for quicker. Today it leads to nothing more than marking of services to aid their job search.
Now, introduce LinkedIn Ads. Suddenly they show up in your messages, in your feed, pretty much all over the place. Useless ads are the bulk of them. Most professionals would never consider clicking on that message link. I know I don’t. No matter how much you make that ad look like a person sent it, there are tells the reader can see through it. First indicator, you cannot reply to the ad. So now messaging can occur. You can however click the link to provide your information.
Reality is expect more. It will keep getting worse. You need to see you are the product, your data is what they all want. Then they sell the data they collect. Truly this is what LinkedIn has become. Ads prove that. They now sell data collected to target where ads are going. No different than any other platform today.