Does anyone else feel like LinkedIn....

Everyone is "thrilled!"

That will be the "AI" that is everywhere these days. Everywhere in a way dog shot is everywhere.

It’s the pits.
I and other colleagues received a barrage of abusive and xenophobic messages from a customer who located us through LinkedIn - legal dept. had to get involved.

And another thing ... somehow the algorithm has changed lately, so instead of seeing posts from the people I follow and am connected with, I see "recommended for you" (ie someone I've never heard of) or posts my connections have liked, which are obviously interesting to them for some reason, but mostly not in the slightest to me. And I see the posts from my own connections two weeks later. So the content stream is now basically useless in real time.
The job ads and DMs are the only reason to go there

Thank you!

In my field, you have to be on there or miss out. I’ve found jobs through it and made some good connections.

You have to wade through a lot of shite to get to some interesting content. It’s definitely changed for the worse in the past few years.

When I was doing strategy research, back in the noughties, I set up a fake LinkedIn profile to evaluate it as a "thing" in IT.

That fake profile still exists and gets connection requests to this day. In a way it's had a better career than me.

(I also set up a fake Twitter account that is still active. Just in case anyone was under any illusions it's only real people there now).

The most annoying thing is that you can't even call out the totally made-up inspirational stories etc because you use the site wearing your "work hat"!

I took against LinkedIn from the start because they were the world's worst spammers. There was a time when I used to open my inbox each morning and there would be ten or more mails from LinkedIn claiming that people I'd never heard of wanted to connect with me. I'm convinced that they were paying Google to bypass spam filters, because this continued even after I set up explicit rules that any mail containing the word LinkedIn should be considered spam.

Thankfully that doesn't seem to happen any more, but the appeal of it still eludes me. For some reason my boss is obsessed with it and keeps trying to get me to create a profile. Which seems even more odd because the only reason I can think of for doing that would be if I wanted to get a different job!

I gave up on LinkedIn when they suddenly started asking me to go through the online ID verificiation via some third party. Maybe I am a bit odd but it felt intrusive.

I must say I'd never spent that much time on LinkedIn prior to that anyway as it often felt to me as though it was a professional equivalent of Facebook. I had a lot of so called "connections" starting from stakeholders at work, suppliers, former colleagues, classmates from school and uni etc all of which were posting things that most of the time I found neither interesting on a personal level, nor useful for work or other purposes. Now that I don't go on LinkedIn for anything, I wouldn't say I feel like I am missing out.

I didn’t have to be on it for years although had a basic profile and have never posted, recently changed careers so been looking professional contacts etc up… was totally shocked to see all my lovely friends who now mostly WhatsApp rather than social media it up, are all on there posting buckets about their professional life but it’s all complete bollocks!

Eg, go for a drink, ‘how’s work, old friend Liz?’

‘Fucking HATE it, they’re all tears, trying to figure out if i have enough savings to just walk out’.

Pop on linked in next day, there is Liz: ‘ENCHANTED to have spent such a THRILLING evening with my BELOVED, ESTEEMED colleagues and peers at the Complete Bollox Awards event… what a MEANINGFUL engagement, I just LOVE that this is what I GET TO DO EVERY. DAY.’

Er, what? Surely all this cognitive dissonance is bad for us?

No one I have ever worked for has ever looked at my LinkedIn profile before hiring me.

However it can give you a useful measure of some employers.

And colleagues.

In a recent role the CEO saw themselves very much as an entrepreneur and encouraged staff to use LinkedIn and to keep their profiles up to date (in company time). The idea being that it would raise his profile through the linking. Which it did seem to achieve.

My first day there he called me in and gave me a copy of a book he wrote. I ended up setting up a media room for him to record podcasts in. Which he then posted on ... LinkedIn.

The most important thing you need to know about LinkedIn is that it's now owned by Microsoft.

Yup. I post a job based in an office in Glasgow and get 300 CVs from dudes in the Middle East.

It absolutely is. I had over a million views on one like that during COVID and got a dozen interviews. You can remove the post later

I haven't been on since June and I work in Social Media!! It's become an awful place, first it was the UK election, then the riots, then the US election. I schedule my posts and run.

I suspended my profile a couple of weeks ago, just had enough of all the self-promotion and congratulatory fakery

I’m always amused when you know the amount of absolute bullshittery in someone’s LinkedIn.

Someone I worked with has a LinkedIn profile proclaiming themselves as a ‘thought leader’ and highly respected in their field etc.

In reality this man has barely had a decent thought in his life, never mind being a thought-leader. He’s a mediocre middle manager who job hops every 18 months when his incompetence in each role becomes apparent.

Go to your profile, click on your photo, select 'edit frame' and choose the original setting.

I'm just starting my own business so do find it useful to keep links with people I network with, as I hope they'll use my services!

I don't post much, though. I mainly play the games on there.

I can’t say I have noticed this. But I do some eye rolls at all the ‘proud to say’, ‘delighted to announce’ , ‘thrilled to say’…job moves/spoke at a conference / finished a course. And the ones who say they have left their job but can’t say where they are moving to so ‘watch this space.’ There was a guy in social media having a laugh at all the opening statements, quite funny.

I just did a (slightly insulting) flounce post on LinkedIn

I felt I’d recovered the part of my soul taken by being exposed to the gross disingenuous pointless shite on LinkedIn

im deleted

It's so cringey. It's just bollocks.

I see a very specialised job advertised where experience in UK regulation is essential, and in some remote backwater, and the number of ME and SA responses saying interested or similar is astounding. “Be one of the first 100 to apply to this job” when you can hand on heart name the three people in the field who would be remotely qualified and you’re wondering if recruitment had to post this rather than just go direct to those people.

World's dullest SM site .. even the people I know, I read what they have written and think WTF.. stop being an arse.

If you guys want to see real linkedin shitshow - Middle East... I have contacts in ME so sometimes get them and some ME promoted posts. The comments are often a barrage of click replies mixed with cv links and "consider me".
You could absolute just post a world "flower" and get 700 comments- "impressive" "great job" "see my CV" "engineer CV see pls" "amazing" "great achievement" "pls hire me for HR director position at your esteemed company"