LinkedIn is one of the strangest social media platforms in existence. Where else can you find people bragging about working unpaid overtime and writing appreciation posts to the company that just laid them off? It’s a really weird website, but is it hurting your career?
LinkedIn is a strange place where people talk at length about how great they are at their job to look enticing to potential future employers. To me, LinkedIn is like this weird cesspool of corporate culture that feels like high school corporate culture, but from the perspective of 2006 when the company was founded. It was a strange concept, but it has worked for LinkedIn, which is now the ninth largest social media platform in the world. It had more monthly users than Twitter before both sites were acquired.
Elon Musk and a team of investors purchased Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, a record sum for a social media company being taken private. Musk’s controversial purchase beat LinkedIn’s record from 2016 when it was taken private by Microsoft for $26.2 billion. Musk is often criticized for overpaying for Twitter when LinkedIn is the comparison. At the time of acquisition, LinkedIn had slightly more monthly users than Twitter but also had something that the bluebird just couldn’t match – the ability to extract unmatched revenue from their users.
Every time you log into LinkedIn you are giving Microsoft something unmatched by every other social media network in existence: immense value. If you are using a service for free, you are the product. And LinkedIn users are the most valuable product of them all.
LinkedIn generated revenue of $13.8 billion in 2022, which is two and a half times higher than Twitter’s highest year of revenue ever. We don’t have public financials on it now since it’s a private company, but most analysts expect that Twitter’s revenue is down since Musk’s acquisition.
The average LinkedIn user is worth 76 times more than the average Reddit user, 35 times more than the average Pinterest user, four times as much as the average YouTube viewer, and three times as much as the average Facebook user. This comparison is not entirely fair either – users who log on to Reddit, Pinterest, YouTube or Facebook spend a lot more time on the platform on average. Additionally, a site like YouTube is much more expensive to operate than LinkedIn given the inherent differences in the cost of hosting HD videos and hosting content that is just text and pictures.
LinkedIn is able to extract revenue from their users at the highest rate per hour in the industry. And when you are the product, that value is coming from you.
LinkedIn achieves this in four key ways:
- Creating a Digital Marketplace for People
LinkedIn is the biggest job search site in the world. Companies and recruiters can post job listings and boost their visibility by paying LinkedIn directly. When you apply for a job through LinkedIn, the employer gets your skills, experience, education, and employment history on display in a consistent format which is a big advantage over normal job search sites like Indeed.
This information should be on your resume but the standardized way that LinkedIn presents it lets recruiters automate their candidate searches far more easily. A subscription to LinkedIn Recruiter costs $9,000 a year but it offers hiring managers and third-party recruiters a range of tools to search for candidates, reach out to them directly, and advertise new roles. It’s a small price to pay for most companies because what they get in return is a buffet of potential applicants for their jobs.
When you ask for a raise and give your manager the ultimatum of quitting, they weigh up the expense of giving you a raise with the expense of replacing you. Finding qualified candidates used to be much harder than it is today, but now if you quit they are just a few keywords away from finding a perfect replacement from the largest collection of career-focused people in the world.
Hiring managers would not pay $9,000 a year for tools that didn’t provide a return on investment. Having the tools to reach out to potential applicants that aren’t even actively looking for a job has given hiring managers a lot of power over employees. And that’s just the first reason LinkedIn is ruining your career.
- Creating an Imbalance of Information
LinkedIn is actually becoming more and more required and requested on every single job application, and that is a big problem. The main reason is LinkedIn just makes it way too easy to give too much information about yourself.
A good LinkedIn profile should have all of the information an employer would ever want to know about you. But company pages don’t have any of the information you really want to know about a potential employer. Salary information is often not shared and job expectations are kept as vague as every other site.
LinkedIn is giving companies the database of employee information for nothing in return. There are some careers that require a higher level of sacrifice than others, and you should know that before going into them. If you want to work as a corporate lawyer or investment banker, you need to accept that you will need to put in long weeks and have little personal time in the first few years of your career.
The same sacrifices are made by doctors who suffer through years of medical school and residency, but in exchange they get a career path with a certainty of high compensation. It’s not fair that you be expected to work like these people if you don’t have the opportunity to make the same money as them.
And that’s the third way that LinkedIn is ruining your career – which is also one of the company’s most lucrative revenue streams. It forces self-comparison.
It’s well known that overconsumption of social media is bad for your mental health because it forces you to compare your everyday self with carefully curated posts by friends and influencers at their very best. Instagram will make you self-conscious about not hitting the gym for three hours every day, but LinkedIn will make you self-conscious about your career.
Career coaches recommend that you make as many connections on LinkedIn as possible because it expands your network and makes your profile more visible. I personally have over 1,000 connections on LinkedIn from my time in investment banking because in the last years of my career, connecting on LinkedIn became more common than handing over a business card.
My feed is now filled every day with thinly disguised brags about how someone became the youngest partner ever at their law firm, or someone else was thankful to have the honor to coordinate the synergistic digitization sprint for internal tools development, enabling their company to pivot to fields of disruptive innovation while empowering the customer experience.
According to the company’s own data, only 1% of monthly users post anything on the site compared to around 20% of users who make at least one post a month on Facebook. People don’t post their bad hair days on Facebook, and they won’t post their career failures on LinkedIn, which can give you as an observer the impression that everybody is doing much better than you are.
And who can blame them? I mean, everybody on LinkedIn is essentially a saint, according to them. LinkedIn and the marketing teams that leverage the platform know that this insecurity is one of the best ways to sell products. If you are feeling insecure about your career, you are going to be more receptive to ads selling services like career development, training, leads generation, or job recruitment.
You are also going to be more willing to spend money on a product that could increase your career earnings because it becomes easy to rationalize as an investment in yourself. According to Insider Intelligence, who runs an annual survey of 15,000 respondents, LinkedIn ranks highly among social media platforms that Americans trust most. It was in the top spot for four years straight, but just got edged out by Pinterest.
The company’s branding of being a professional place where professionals discuss professional things helps this reputation, even though it still takes advantage of the same human emotions to sell advertising space as every other social media site.
That’s not actually the problem though. As a YouTuber I am sympathetic to the fact that a company in the market for attention needs to monetize that attention to run a sustainable business. LinkedIn attracts a niche, valuable audience with high intent, and they should charge what people are offering to pay for impressions.
LinkedIn vets advertisers more rigorously than other platforms like Meta’s ad manager or Google AdSense. The problem that this actually creates for your career is that it forces you to think that you need to add more achievements to your page in order to stand out.
According to the market research database Grand View Research, the American personal development market is worth $12 billion and expected to grow at a rate of 4.1% over the next eight years. People are spending more of their money and unpaid hours to collect certifications like they are Pokemon gym badges.
Recruiters and hiring managers love this trend because they are paid to put people in roles, and the performance of a new hire once they are in the job doesn’t matter to them. Convincing the manager that will actually be responsible for the new hire is much easier when they have a long list of certifications to point out.
There is no evidence to suggest that career development training has any correlation with job performance, and on the contrary, people that seek out meaningless tokens to boost their employability are more likely to switch jobs more often.
LinkedIn didn’t create this problem, but it did make it much worse. And unfortunately that’s what you have to compete with now. The 1% of people who actually post on LinkedIn also set the standard for working unpaid overtime, putting a job first, and blurring the lines between professional and personal domains.
They do it to show off and increase their chances of getting a job, but since it’s the only thing that gets displayed on the world’s largest professional network, companies and managers start to think it’s a normal expectation.
- Creating a Culture of Corporate Worship
The fourth way that LinkedIn is ruining your career is by creating a culture of corporate worship. Since posts on LinkedIn are not anonymous and people want to keep their jobs, any post that mentions a company is going to be overwhelmingly positive.
Some companies strongly suggest that their staff have a strong presence on LinkedIn because they know it can help their image as a desirable employer. Corporate worship is not just weird, it can hurt your career.
Big companies make it very easy for people to believe that they are doing something bigger than just exchanging their time and skills for money. Companies have been doing this for a long time before LinkedIn. Walmart employees have to recite their company cheer every morning because it helps with staff retention.
But LinkedIn has enabled companies to push this kind of cringe corporate worship into the mainstream. The overwhelmingly positive feedback that LinkedIn gives companies also makes them less likely to acknowledge areas of weakness in their organization.
Praise from identified members of a team is much easier for managers to address than criticism from an anonymous forum. Many don’t stop to think that they aren’t going to get negative feedback from people who just want to advance their careers, and that’s the worst part.
In most professional industries, not having a LinkedIn profile is seen as strange and unprofessional. For some companies, it can immediately disqualify you as a candidate. Recruitment agencies that specialize in tech and finance have publicly said that people without a LinkedIn account don’t take their career seriously enough to be considered for jobs.
So even though everybody that uses the platform knows it’s a giant corporate circle jerk, they need to play along to get the most out of their career. One of the most alarming trends to come from LinkedIn recently followed the wave of tech layoffs, where ex-employees wrote appreciation posts about the companies that just fired them.
The employees didn’t do it because they were grateful for the skills and experience they gained from their time with the company. They did it because it was the most corporate friendly way to announce they were looking for a new job. These posts benefited the company more than the laid off employees. But if it gave these employees even a slightly better chance of finding a new job quickly, many were willing to put their dignity aside and play along, which is something that they will probably be doing for the rest of their lives.
Conclusion
LinkedIn provides immense value to companies looking to hire, market products, and build their employer brand. But its culture of self-promotion and corporate worship creates an imbalance of power between employees and employers. By understanding how LinkedIn exploits its users, you can make better decisions about how much personal information to share publicly and how to filter the noise of self-congratulatory content.