Every time I log in to LinkedIn, my brain asks the question “What is this?”

This post is purely about my own experiences and observations. I don’t expect it to generalize, but I feel like I need to get these thoughts out so maybe I won’t ruminate on them as much.

Ancient History: 2008-2015

I joined LinkedIn during the summer of 2008. I was working as an intern. We were the first official class of interns at the Fortune 500 company I was working at. They’d hired interns before, but this was the first year they had us all start on the same date, and all interns from across the different departments of the corporate office did professional development activities, seminars, etc. together. One of those seminars was about the importance of creating and maintaining a LinkedIn profile. I still remember the names of the HR people who led the seminar; I can still picture their faces and hear their voices… and I’m still connected with them on LinkedIn!

At the time it was pitched as a professional networking tool. The interface leaned heavily into levels of connections. First level connections (your own current and former colleagues), then second level connections (colleagues of colleagues), then 3rd level connections, then maybe they stopped after 3rd level? The pitch was: even if no one you know is hiring, they might know someone who is hiring, so this tool is invaluable for young people entering the professional job market for the first time.

This seemed reasonable to me. Even though a lot of corporate-speak felt completely fake and self-serving, this tool they forced on us actually seemed to have a practical purpose.

After college, I went right into grad school, where very few people had ever heard of LinkedIn. After grad school, I went right into academia. People in academia have heard of LinkedIn, and a lot of us had LinkedIn profiles, but no one I knew actually used it for anything. It wasn’t for us. Whenever students or colleagues requested to be connected on LinkedIn, I would accept. Mostly because I still had that same framework for LinkedIn that was given to me the summer of 2008: I was helping them expand their professional network, paying it forward.

I don’t remember LinkedIn looking or feeling like a social media website at all when I joined. In 2008, myspace was pretty much dead but Facebook was only just starting to take off. Facebook was HUGE for college students, but it had only recently (in the last year or so) opened up to people without .edu email accounts. Twitter existed, but it was still an enigma to me as a person who talks and writes too much. How can you fit a complete idea into only 140 characters? “MICRO blogging”? I’ll just write an actual blog post, thank you very much.

On the other hand, I think there was something sort of resembling what we now know as a social media feed on LinkedIn in 2008. But I only remember people posting about direct professional accomplishments – something they had done, or their team had done, or their company had done (and to post at the company level, they were probably an executive). And most people didn’t directly author posts, as far as I remember. They would just add things to their profile. And maybe the “feed” included profile updates in addition to authored posts?

I treated my LinkedIn profile like an abridged resume. Every time I updated my CV/resume, I would check in with my LinkedIn profile and add anything that seemed important or relevant. But almost nothing felt relevant, because as I said above, my “industry” of academia did not view LinkedIn as relevant. Anything I put there was “just in case.” I assumed zero people were looking at it, and that was mostly correct. So it was basically a list of jobs I’d had and degrees I’d earned but zero frills or details.

Not-as-ancient History: 2016-2023

As I exited graduate school and started my “real” career, LinkedIn exited my mind. It wasn’t even really on the back burner. It was in a closed cabinet – a cabinet in the basement, not even in the kitchen with the stove and the burners. Once or twice a year, I would get an email notification about a backlog of connection requests and I would go in and approve anyone who I actually knew and ignore any randoms. And that was the extent to which I engaged with LinkedIn.

Peripherally, I knew LinkedIn was still “a thing.” I heard this from my students, and I heard about it in the news. Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016. After that, I assumed it had staying power, but I also assumed it would morph into a different beast entirely to fit in with the “Microsoft brand” (whatever that is). I was surprised when nothing really seemed to change about it, at least to someone like me who was only engaged with the product infrequently and at such a superficial level. The logo didn’t change (OK, they rounded the edges of the square logo at some point) and the email notifications I got about connection requests kept coming to my inbox.

Preparing for culture shock in 2024

Now, in 2024, I am looking for a new job. And for the first time since I started looking for “real” jobs, I am explicitly not including academic positions in that search. For all of my prior major job searches (2010, 2015, 2019), I applied to both academic and non-academic positions. And not to brag, but I was successful in securing interviews in both academic and non-academic sectors every time. I love academic research, which is what inspired me to apply to graduate school and academic jobs. As I got experience in academia, I found out that teaching, advising, and mentoring was a rewarding component of those jobs for me as well. On the other hand, I loved my industry internship experience and could see myself happy with that kind of life indefinitely too. Any time I got the opportunity to collaborate with industry professionals during my academic career, I related to them and could see myself thriving in that environment. So I was never the elite academia-or-die person, even though I did choose an academic position during each of those critical junctures in my career.

For this job search, since I can’t fall back on the ways of academia that I’ve learned, I have to learn what “real” people do. Most of the context I have for that is LinkedIn. Other tools I’ve used before are gone, absorbed by the tech monopolies creeping their way into every industry. In terms of job hunting, I also have experience going door to door in a small town and asking if they’re hiring, but that doesn’t really feel like a viable option for professional positions in 2024. So I started with LinkedIn. I’m branching out to other online job boards slowly too, but LinkedIn is where I started.

Positive changes I’ve noticed

The first thing I noticed when I was essentially transported from 2008 LinkedIn to 2024 LinkedIn with no points of reference in between was that it IS a fully functional job board now. There are a LOT of jobs posted on there. I can’t imagine what a game changer it has been for HR professionals. This change alone made it really easy for me to start a modern job search.

Other changes I’ve noticed

What is going on with the feed? It wants so badly to look like social media, but no one is authentic. I know that no one is completely authentic on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram either, trust me. But if the point of LinkedIn is to be a professional social network, then everyone has to bring their “at work” masks to this space. People are trying to appeal to emotions for engagement, while being 100% inauthentic. I was not ready for how fake and gross the main page feels. I’ve stopped trying to understand it or engage with it. I just completely ignore it and click onto the other tabs. The homepage of LinkedIn is just not for me, and if that means no one will hire me, then I guess I will just lose my career and my house and my stuff and just waste away in complete poverty. Because it is not for me.

Quirks I’ve noticed

Why are you so limited in job titles when actively looking for work?

I can only indicate to the algorithm a maximum of 5 specific job titles I’m interested in seeing. It feels arbitrary (because it is) and WAY too limited. Sure, I can individually search for other job titles. But on the LinkedIn jobs tab, which shows recommended jobs based on your profile criteria, you are limited to 5 job titles when building those criteria. In academia, this makes sense because there are literally like 5 total possible jobs (at least in the US): adjunct instructor, lecturer, assistant professor, associate professor, full professor. But in the non-academic world, job titles are nowhere near standardized.

I know I’m not your average job-seeker in a lot of ways, but I don’t think I’m some special unique mythical unicorn either. I should be able to use the same tools as any other adult. But the way the entire job search pipeline is built on LinkedIn, it seems like the assumption is that everyone has pigeonholed themselves into one or MAYBE TWO ideas of exactly who they are and what they want. This is just one example, but I feel this pressure at every turn. And now that I’ve started to branch out to other job sites & apps, I’m seeing the same thing other places as well. So, I don’t think this is a problem unique to LinkedIn. However, they seem to be the de facto industry standard, so I think a lot of what other smaller companies in the space do is based on what LinkedIn does.

What is going on with their people recommendation engine?

My 2008-2015 recommendations: “hey we noticed you and this other person had similar job titles at the same organization during overlapping years, do you know each other?” Those recommendations made sense. My 2024 recommendations make zero sense. In 2024, I have exclusively been recommended to connect with people I do not know. Mostly it’s random normal people I have nothing in common with, but I’ve also been recommended two different former NFL players, weeks apart.

I guess you could make the argument that it’s because I’ve been such a disengaged user for so long, the algorithm doesn’t know what to recommend me. Sure, that’s fair. But I know how these tools work. If your tool is making a recommendation in which the model has near zero confidence, why is that getting pushed to the end user? Why is there not a quality threshold? You are literally owned by Microsoft. I know you know better.

Notifications as broken as the 2024 Twitter mobile app

It is well known that on the Twitter mobile app, the process for marking a notification as not-new involves the following:

see new/unread notification
click the notifications tab
pull down to refresh
go back to your main feed
see that the notifications are still showing as new/unread
go back to the notifications tab
pull down to refresh again
go back to your main feed
notifications are now correct

A real experience I had on LinkedIn two days ago:

On the desktop site, the “Notifications” tab has 22 “unread” notifications.

I click on it.

The timestamps on these notifications are between 5 hours ago and 5 weeks ago. All of them are notifications I’d already engaged with or dismissed either via email or via the mobile app or the desktop site.

I exited out of the notifications view and refreshed. All 22 are still marked as new/unread.

Now what?

All of these ideas swirl in my head every time I open the website on my computer or the app on my phone. What am I going to do about it? Am I going to keep using LinkedIn? If so, am I going to engage more deeply? more superficially?

First of all, even though I find their process severely limited, I will keep using it as a job search engine, in conjunction with a few others.

I don’t think I’m ready for the homepage / feed yet. I don’t get it. Entering into a professional social network I don’t understand the norms of could have negative consequences for the future of my career, so it feels way too high risk to just jump in and learn by doing. All I know is that the few times I’ve actually scrolled my feed in the past few months, there wasn’t anything of value in it. Again, this could be because I haven’t calibrated their algorithm by engaging with any posts, so it doesn’t know what to show me. But without naming names, I will say that there have been people I like and respect that showed up in the feed, but their posts were superficial and uninteresting. And I know for a fact this is not because the person is superficial or uninteresting – it’s because it’s the kind of content they have been trained to post on LinkedIn, whether that training came formally or by observation of their own feed.

(With all that said, my brain is screaming “You should post a link to this blog post on LinkedIn when it’s done!” But I know that is a terrible idea!)

My action items

(Do you like how I used the business-y phrase “action item”? Very on theme!)

• Expand beyond LinkedIn. I have already done this a little bit, but I need to do it more. LinkedIn clearly is not fulfilling all of my needs during this search, so I need to cast a wider net. Maybe I’ll actually find something I like! If I do, maybe I’ll write about it.
• Update my LinkedIn profile. I was extremely resistant to doing this at first. I thought “If someone looks at my profile and thinks it is too bare and not braggy enough, then I don’t want to work with/for them.” But the landscape of job searching has completely changed since I first got career advice in 2004-2006 and 2008-2010. I have to adapt to the new landscape. I can’t expect the entire job-giving world to adapt to my expectations. We have to meet somewhere in the middle, of course. But to do this, I will need to…
• Learn what a 2024 LinkedIn profile is supposed to include. This is going to require some research on my part. If anyone can recommend a good text or video guide that is current, please share it with me. I have some ideas about what I should probably add, but I can’t just go with my instincts. Clearly my instincts don’t align with the current iteration of LinkedIn (as evidenced by me “just not getting” the feed), and I know myself well enough to know my instincts will cause me to write/include too much if I start fleshing out my profile. I need to know what the expected level of detail is for the environment and then work to match that.
• Start some projects. This isn’t specific to LinkedIn, but I am slowly realizing this is essential to me having a successful job search. At first, my thoughts were “I already have all of the skills and experience I need to get what I want. Therefore, I don’t need to spend time during this search studying new technologies or building a portfolio of new or previous work to share.” I still wholeheartedly believe the first sentence in that quote, but I am no longer convinced that the conclusion I drew logically follows from it.
  • I was so engrossed in putting out fires at my previous two jobs that I wasn’t staying as current as I thought I was in the field. So, there are some gaps I should fill in now while I have the time and motivation!
  • When I do start landing interviews (I know I will, even though it hasn’t happened yet), I am going to need a body of work I can refer back to as examples of what I have done & can do, rather than just stating it and hoping they’ll take my word for it. I have been on the interviewer side, and I know from experience how valuable it is when candidates can show receipts. Why would it be any different when I’m on the other side? It isn’t!