CringedIN

How LinkedInfluencers have turned it into TEDTalk nobody wanted to hear.

In a late Friday meeting, my oversharing, virtue-signaling hustle bro-kind colleague shrieked that my LinkedIn, which looks like the Facebook profile of a veteran with no intent of making a career comeback, could hurt the chances of advancing my career. No sloppy articles on industry trends, no superfluous job descriptions, no lightning-hit-me-moment stories of business advice. Basically, No action on it.

Remind you, by this point I had gotten through Monday to Friday and even the idea to brave an argument was exhausting. So, I painfully retorted with “Have a great weekend”, gave him a coy smile, and parted for good.

It’s ironic, considering that one of the benefits of having a career in tech and finance, I thought, I wouldn’t have to indulge in this kind of laborious self-promotion. That, I thought, was reserved for creative industries where the field is saturated and competitive and relies heavily on relationships and clout. But things, given the rate of technological change, might have changed differently than I had thought.

Over the weekend I decided to doll up my LinkedIn, a shorthand to look important and rack up a few hundred followers. Last I remember, this platform used to be a professional recruitment and networking platform geared toward average white-collar professionals seeking job opportunities or finding a talent pool to hire from. It is not a pretty interface to look at, neither it is friendly nor customizable. Its only selling point to me is that you won’t see crazy relatives spouting conspiracy theories or photos of your exes, even if you might get some questionable business advice from wannabe CEOs.

But now, LinkedIn, with nearly 13Mn users flagged as creators, has gone all in on creators. Users are building a personal brand by spouting entrepreneurial advice, nuggets of wisdom, long self-involved stories in hopes of boosting their career, amassing fake connections to look important, nabbing a book deal, and few speaker-at-conference gigs. It has changed. It feels like you’ve shown up to a TED talk that no one wanted to hear. Even worse, it can be equal parts cheesy and cringeworthy when people try to turn themselves into LinkedIn influencers or write long, rambling, embarrassing attempts at inspirational advice.

I stumbled upon, the very popular Twitter account called @StateOfLinkedIn, which is devoted to mocking the worst offenders. A scroll through its timeline reveals long-winded, self-congratulatory threads detailing anecdotes that probably/definitely didn’t happen, bizarrely poetic descriptions of a day in the life of an entrepreneur, and “subtle” flexes of professional stats. Together they make up a new sort of business-speak — less jargony and more inspiration-porn that runs rampant on LinkedIn.

It can also feel like LinkedIn is kind of pointless these days for a lot of industries. It’s always been the case that personal connections hold a lot more weight in finding a job than anonymous career accolades and professional stats. Given LinkedIn makes so many people’s career experiences and resumes look basically identical, real-life connections hold even more currency. Certain industries – especially creative or arts-based industries – have largely given up on LinkedIn as a place to find talent. They might ask for your profile as an easy way of checking your professional experience, but they’re certainly not combing through LinkedIn posts and hashtags to fill a coveted position

So I concluded, “There’s no pressure to try and create a whole persona on LinkedIn, beyond a basic level of appearing capable and successful for potential work opportunities”. And instead, I ended up writing a substack about it.