LinkedIn, for the unemployed, recently graduated, and generally aimless, is no more than an ugly interface where your former peers, turned analysts and sales people, have a socially acceptable forum to spit on you and your liberal arts degree. Do you deserve it? Sure. You were insufferable as an undergrad and still are now. However, at least as one of the aforementioned unemployed liberal arts graduates, I don’t have to look back on a LinkedIn timeline filled with, what I hope are, copy and pasted blurbs from Karen at HR which inevitably read as follows:
Hello all, after an incredible, albeit remote, summer interning for *insert bank, consulting firm, tech company*, I am THRILLED and grateful to announce that I have accepted a full-time offer as a *job title* in the *corporate team name that needs work* department.
I would like to thank my mentors from this summer, *name *, *name*, *name* for investing in my personal development and making this summer SUCH a positive experience. I would also like to thank *excessively long business school name* for preparing me to take on such an exciting role.
I’m looking forward to starting the first chapter of my professional career with this great opportunity. #*CompanyName* #FirstYearAssociate
**company logo**
My disgust toward these Facebook-style status updates is not unfounded. Not only are they annoying reminders of my own lack of direction, they are directly opposed to the self-deprecating social media etiquette I’ve habituated. I thought we all agreed NOT to take our profiles and pages too seriously…that these “sophisticated” algorithms lead to superficial connections at best and the alt-right pipeline at worst. Did we learn nothing from the destruction of democracy?!
The most egregious posts are hardly by the newly employed, not the pictures of intern “swag” bags or tips for Zoom networking events from a VP that is always on mute, but the employers themselves. By this I do not mean the corporate accounts, but the adults that hover around every twenty-something’s “network”. People’s parents and libertarian business professors for the most part. I don’t know who made meme accounts on LinkedIn (fingers crossed it’s a bot because they could use some punch-ups), but if you know an adult active on this networking platform, tell them that everyone can see they just liked:
a screenshot
of a tweet
of a picture
of Joe Biden with a turban and beard
reading “Taliban’s Employee of the Week” from an account titled something along the lines of Patriotic Americans for America.
This brings me to my last point: LinkedIn is the worst part of every other social media site…by design. Between the algorithm friendly resume updates, my feed is a cluster of alt-right meme accounts, promoted ads for giant corporations, thinly veiled anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and multi-level marketing schemes. For a while I thought my feed was uniquely bad because I was uniquely bad at social media networking (a fact that I know to be true). Guess what? It’s not just me.
Between accounts like this one, chronicling general fiction that user’s pass off as true, and actual LinkedIn hate pages (@StateOfLinkedIn and @CrapOnLinkedIn), over 100,000 combined twitter users either agree with me to some extent or find the posts relatable enough to keep on their feed.
In the words of Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, I don’t think so honey LinkedIn: You are the shittier version of the famously shitty Facebook. I would say check yourself, but you might turn that into another useless Premium feature. Stop acting like you’re better because you pretend to create professional opportunities. You’re basically Instagram for vanilla headshots and less accurate targeted ads. I. Do. Not. Thinkso. LinkedIn.
