The LinkedIn Paradox

Social Media - Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you can’t really avoid ‘em these days. It appears everybody and their aunt is on at least one social media platform these days. Whether it’s Twitter, Snapchat, whatever that may be, or Facebook, the social network that everyone loves to hate, but that no one seems to be willing to leave or replace, there appears to be a platform for just about everyone, and everything. And like every major new trend, these platforms have not only attracted their fair, and sometimes patently unfair, share of criticism, but have also cultivated their own microcosm with its own etiquette, and social norms. However, the purpose of these platforms has always been pretty much the same: To enable their users to remain in contact with friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and if need be even relatives; to allow users to present and express themselves in ways that seemed almost impossible previously. With that specific aim, and the extreme proliferation of such platforms over the last decade, it was only a matter of time before they became of interest for recruiters, and dedicated social networks for “professionals” were soon a foregone conclusion.

Enter LinkedIn. Launched in May 2003 in Mountain View, California, LinkedIn is another one of the third wave of startups that bubbled up in Silicon Valley following the collapse of the .com bubble in the early 2000s. Launching a professionals only social networking service at a time when MySpace (remember those guys?) was the hottest game in town, and Facebook was just barely a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye was certainly a gutsy move. However, time has proven the crew around Reid Hoffmann, Jeff Weiner et.al. right. It is now the premier social networking platform for professionals, leaving competitors like XING in the dust. Not only that, LinkedIn has evolved, moving far beyond simply being a social networking service. Nowadays, the platform is not just an essential part of the job market. both for candidates and recruiters, companies are more and more using LinkedIn for B2B promotion, business development, or lead generation.

If you want to get ahead in today's job market, this page is crucial. Or is it?

And that is where the trouble starts. Don’t get me wrong, it is perfectly reasonable for companies to use a platform for marketing where their message isn’t drowned out by an avalanche of cringeworthy “Despacito” covers, a plethora of cat content, and truckloads of other hare-brained “content” that seems all the rage these days. In fact, I consider it refreshing in many ways, although cat content should always be admissible in my eyes. And yes, it is also reasonable for employers to expect their employees to share company news or stats that stand out in their eyes on their own personal LinkedIn profiles. The problem manifests itself when it comes to “original” content produced by individual LinkedIn users that they want to share on their profiles. The increasing focus on using LinkedIn as a marketing business development tool has led numerous employers to demand that any “original” content by their employees be approved by the respective corporate communications or marketing teams before it can be published. The result is easy to see even on my own LinkedIn feed - apart from posts by companies I follow, 95% of my feed just consists of posts shared or liked by my connections without any comment, individual reasoning, or personal note. 

I understand that employers want to ensure that their employees express themselves in a manner that is not detrimental to their own reputation, in fact it would be foolish not to do so. However, as I mentioned in the introductory paragraph, social networks tend to develop their own etiquette and norms, and LinkedIn is no exception. The way the network is set up, the community that has developed, already discourages an excessively informal tone, so in my eyes, the policies I outlined in the previous paragraph basically destroy any individuality, and turn employees into corporate parrots, with end result I described above. Not only does this severely hamper the usefulness of LinkedIn as a networking and recruiting tool, it also severely undermines its utility as a sales or business development tool, since it basically becomes impossible to determine whether a particular user is the person you really want to contact, since you can’t tell from his profile whether the job description is still accurate.

The end result is predictable. Employees have no way of attractively presenting themselves, of showing their individual strengths and interests, at least not without risking major trouble with their HR or corporate communications departments. This is especially problematic for employees  in low or entry level positions, whose salary is more often than not insufficient to allow them to save a useful amount of money for unforeseen circumstances. By reducing themselves to reposting or sharing pre-existing corporate content, employees tend to stand out less and less from the millions of other LinkedIn users, with their individual creativity or talent, which may be just what another company might be looking for, drowned out, reducing their market value. This is not just a problem for the individual LinkedIn users, but for recruiters as well. Rather than seeing a candidate’s unique selling point, and interests, right on their profile, and going after the promising candidates, both company recruiters and headhunting firms are reduced to “carpet-bomb” every user in a certain industry with generic messages and hope they can find some useful traits later during the interview process. I suspect that this is not the most efficient way for them to spend their resources, and it certainly does not nothing to increase the confidence of potential candidates in the recruitment process, or LinkedIn’s reliability as a job seeking platform.

This is a typical sight on a LinkedIn feed. Uncommented reposts, generic articles by pages, and company advertisement. There is literally nothing that stands out here.

In addition to being less than optimal for the users involved at both ends of the recruiting process, there is another, equally problematic side-effect. With the devolution of LinkedIn into a corporate “echo chamber”, there is a real risk for the brand as such. This is especially true in markets with a noticeable reluctance towards social media, such as Germany. The general assumption in Germany is that social media users generally gravitate towards the shallow end of the gene pool, and when users on a platform are reduced to echoing other people’s content, this notion is reinforced, which is one of the reasons why LinkedIn is already of dubious utility in the DACH market, particularly in Germany and Austria. There’s a reason why a platform like XING, which is hanging on by the skin of its teeth internationally, is still a major player in Germany.

With the current echo-chamber development at LinkedIn, regional competitors like XING are becoming more attractive for users again.

And that is the LinkedIn Paradox in a nutshell: A platform designed for professionals to present themselves to their peers and potential employers in a way they can’t in the physical world has evolved into an employer-centric echo chamber that makes it all but impossible for professionals to present themselves to their peers and potential employers. A Mr. Möbius called, he wants his loop back. 

But seriously, how can we get out of this loop, bar setting up yet another social media platform in a market that is already showing signs of over-saturation? Well, there are numerous possible ways to resolve this issue, and no, a workers uprising is NOT among those. In the first instance, the ball is in the employer’s field. They quite frankly need to take a chill pill, nor rather several of those. LinkedIn is primarily a user-based service, and not a company-based one. The biggest name on a LinkedIn profile is the user’s name, not the company name, so it should be obvious to anyone but the most fact-resistant individuals that this is a person writing and not an organisation. Companies all over the world are now proudly professing how much they value the individuality and diversity of their employees, so I see no reason why they shouldn’t heed their own words and cut their staff some slack on LinkedIn. Additionally, providing basic social media training to their staff, and laying out the difference between different social media platforms and their respective etiquettes is another tool that employers should make more use of.

LinkedIn is not getting off scot-free here either. Now, I know they just recently launched a new interface across all platforms, but the site is still clunky, cumbersome to use, and cluttered, especially on smaller displays. This is definitely something that needs to be looked at. While doing that, particular efforts should be made to emphasise that postings are made by individuals, and not necessarily their employers. Whether this is done by a redesign, or by a simple toggle when creating a post to emphasise either company or user name, or by a completely different method is up to LinkedIn, and their owners Microsoft. They’ve built the site into the globally recognised brand and platform it is today, and it should be in their own interest not to let the “mission creep” that has led us to the current situation jeopardise that standing.

Last but not least, it is also up to us individual users. We need to familiarise ourselves with the platforms we’re using, learn the differences between them, the different etiquettes and communities that have grown up around them, and learn to adapt our own style to these different platforms, without losing our individuality. It should be obvious that rambling, ranting posts full of glaring errors, and laced with profanity, have no place on LinkedIn et. al. In an ideal world, they shouldn’t even have a place on Facebook, but hey, it’s an imperfect world we’re living in. It should equally obvious that, no matter how amazing you might look in that bikini, it would probably be best to leave those pictures on Instagram or Snapchat, and not post them on a platform where the entire management team all the way up to the CEO will see them. Ultimately, LinkedIn is about getting noticed as a professional by your peers and colleagues. It is too powerful a tool to be relegated to serve as an echo chamber.