Hey LinkedIn – U OK, hon?
Today, I received an exciting (?!) message. Apparently, it’s 18 years since I created my account on LinkedIn.
The message came with the usual hints that some other users might have looked at my profile, and the companies or industries they were from; as well as a bunch of metrics about how many new connections I’ve made this year, how often my posts have been viewed etc. – as well as a suggestion that I should share that with my network. The classic growth hacky “if this user tells his friends how successful he’s being, others might spend more of their time engaging to compete/grow as well”.
It’s true that I have spent more time on LinkedIn in the past ~18 months, particularly since the Twitter layoff and meltdown, of course. However, over that same period I’ve also noticed that it has changed a lot, and moved further away from being the home of a CV/resume, more into being a classic general-purpose social network. More Facebook-y, if you will. More emphasis on the feed and the algorithm, more focus on increasing dwell time, than on helping users to maintain a professional profile and sets of qualifications and to get hired. In fact, it has become pretty frustrating to use from the perspective of wanting to get hired – it is where I would like to showcase my career and achievements, but rather than using my LinkedIn profile to communicate that to a client, a recruiter will almost always want a separate CV anyway…
So, what’s the point?
As further evidence of how far LinkedIn has pivoted away from its original purpose, it has even added… games? This is a classic hack to “increase dwell time on platform” – maybe I might engage with a game, and stay on the page, and then be online to answer an incoming chat message from a connection… but what on earth are they thinking otherwise? I cannot see any reason to have games shoehorned into a professional networking platform like this – and I say that as someone who has been co-hosting a podcast literally titled Games at Work dot Biz for the best part of a decade.
This is a bit of a grumble, partly because I just don’t see the value of a lot of these frivolous additions. I guess some product managers somewhere have a strategy – but the reason I am personally on LinkedIn is to maintain a career history, and to build professional connections. The length of time I’ve been using it, the metrics on how many new connections I’ve made in a specific period, etc are really not very useful pieces of information. I guess I’ve written this post as a bit of a virtual shrug 
to it all!