I foolishly signed up for LinkedIn many years ago, when the company I worked for was looking wobbly and I figured it would help in future job searches. Shortly after the company shut down, and as former coworkers found new jobs, I suddenly got a bunch of messages from them via LinkedIn, telling me about how there were jobs at their new companies that I should apply for. I sent them questions about what their new companies were like, and got no replies, which I didn’t think much about, as I assumed it was because they were very busy at their new jobs and slow to reply, but was grateful they were thinking about me. I immediately sent out a bunch of applications and wasted a bunch of time before I realized there were, in fact, no jobs for me at those companies. It was only at that point I figured out that the messages I had received “from my former coworkers” were, in fact, automated messages from LinkedIn itself, and it deciding what jobs were relevant to me was based entirely on some bad keyword matching. I had recruiters make contact with me via LinkedIn, and they suggested jobs based on only slightly better, but still irrelevant, keyword matching. (I imagine they’re using LLMs now and everything is ten times worse.)
I still get deluged with irrelevant job offers, which I ignore, along with all the other messages from it. (Occasionally I look in the folder where such emails molder, and get amused by chirpy messages ostensibly from would-be employers, whose escalating interest and mentions of our “previous discussions” really hammer home what a total fraudulent farce the whole platform is.) I’d delete my account, just for the sake of anyone actually trying to reach me via the site, so they’d not waste their time, but I long ago forgot my login information and I’m not sure I even really could delete my account.
All of which is to say: fuck LinkedIn. They actually manage to be worse than useless for its original purpose. Anyone trying to use it as a social media platform has to be a psychopath.
