Leah vs. LinkedIn

My Despise for the Corporate Social Media App

Let me start off by saying, this is just my personal opinion on the app, which may sound like I dislike it, and you may possibly be right.

There are so many reasons why I hate LinkedIn-hear me out. I'm a competitive person yet seeing someone who who has no idea who you are, doing better than you because you share the same alumni feels, strange?

It's a corporate social media app. Which respectfully has no relevance to who I am as a person. Like Tinder for jobs. A professional yet superficial way of sieving through candidates. Every time I search about 'what's the right approach to applying for jobs?' , every single person would say, 'just go on LinkedIn and connect with people you'd like to work with!'. People who are in the field that you want to explore. People that are in the prime of their careers that you could learn from. They always seem so passionate about it like LinkedIn is this sort of magical corporate portal. So I downloaded it, with the idea that I was going to learn, grow, and connect with the best of the best.

Oh boy was I wrong...

I had 5 solid connections. 4 of which I lived with, and the other an old friend of mine. It felt anti-climatic. Is this the so called 'networking' everyone was bragging about? It looked like a more appropriate Tumblr (minus the fanfics). It was full of reposts, motivational Monday quotes, and ridiculous over saturated 'start up business stories'. I was on the phone to my mum filling her in about university life when I thought best to bring it up. See if I wasn't going crazy. Just as she was about to end the phone call I asked, 'by the way, have you ever used LinkedIn?'

She laughed. I sat there in silence.

'What's so funny?' I could imagine her stood in the kitchen, phone wedged between her neck and shoulder as the kettle clicked. 'No, nothing.' She lowered her tone, 'It's just, isn't that the white people app for business?'

And that only became more evident to me when, on one random evening, a couple weeks after the phone call with my mum, my flatmate turned to me and said 'right that's it, lets sort ourselves out.'

Oh Lord. This flatmate loved re-inventing herself, like a new version of perception. I rolled my eyes waiting for what had quipped her interest this time.

Thankfully I wasn't alone, with my best friend sat next to me. She turned to us and said 'LinkedIn!'. My body shuddered. Reluctantly I opened my laptop and logged into my profile, and that's when I realised I was definitely not networking. Of course I was sat in the middle, so I was able to see both of their screens in my prefrail vision, before we all willingly shared our screens. I remember nearly fainting when I saw my flatmates connections numbers. It was in the 100s and her profile looked so professional. She even had a picture that had been professionally taken in black and white.

I looked back at my profile and laughed to myself as the faceless icon stared back at me. My flatmate took control instructing my best friend and I what to put, and where to put it. She started on me first with my picture (one of me laughing to show I look approachable), then my bio, my skills and so forth. It was great, I was sending out requests (some which got rejected). But I remember waking up to 15 extra connections and a head full of ideas.

Fast forward to now and a single notification from the app makes me jump. I applied to a lot of jobs on LinkedIn, none of which I got even a slither of a response back from. Which I though was strange considering everyone's high appraisal. My opinion on the app had changed. In order to gain any form of clarification career wise, I needed to be active if not pro-active; like a clingy student who craved adult validation.

I hit of a bit of a low point last year, and didn't really know where to extend my skills, finding hobbies to fill the time. And as somebody who picks up things quite easily, I was teaching myself graphic design by day, and crying into my pillow by night. I remember I was dating this person who enjoyed gaining every detail of my life; as I'm sure they assumed we were going to get married at some point of our ridged relationship. We were both attracted to each other, being that we were in difficult spots and 'figuring things out'. And during one of our many facetime calls of me ranting about being unlucky with the job market they asked, 'what does your LinkedIn look like?'. What could my LinkedIn have anything to do with me not feeling like I know what to do with my life.

They got out their laptop, and I felt myself get PTSD as they started sharing their screen with me, waiting for my log in. They scanned my profile and told me, 'you just need to connect with people and the jobs will follow'. However the idea blew my mind on how the two even correlated. To be employed I've got to be deemed as, popular? And even worse, popular amongst people whom share no real connections to me in real life?

'That's networking Leah. You'll get better at it the older you get.'

Bare in mind there was only a 4 year gap between us. And as I looked at their 150 connections I asked, 'but you're not in a job that's relevant to your degree, and you've got more connections than me. So I don't get it.' We both paused. I guess you could say it was a slightly bitchy comment on my behalf, and I assumed was probably half of the reason why we didn't last very long after that.

I take social media with a pinch of salt, and LinkedIn is no different. Maybe I'm just discrediting the app as it's done nothing for me, but make me analyse where I'm not in life or where I should be. It invites a form of toxic nature of the corporate environment, straight into your home. It's even peculiar when I go on the app to get rid of the backlog of notifications, and see posts that would be more suited on Instagram.

Which makes me question, what really is the main purpose of LinkedIn?

If you're not on it actively then really its a massive waste of time. In Adrian Dayton's article on Why You Should Delete Your LinkedIn Account (forbes.com). he shares his opinions on the app, and the way is has no real impact, unless it's from an online marketing perspective; which is very LinkedIn coded.

Everyone is different, and I've learned that I am not a person that spends enough time her phone for LinkedIn to take grave impact on my life. And though they market themselves in a 'clever' way', it's not for me. And I think that should be normalised as okay. Not everyone is going to easily adjust to everything in the corporate world, and LinkedIn is not the only platform that allows networking.

So this is a bit of a 'I see through your bullshit' moment. I know plenty of friends whom only established a LinkedIn account once they found their jobs and still that was just to keep up appearances. Which is something I just can't bring myself to do.

And you're probably saying, 'but you have it linked in your website'. But I think that's just force of habit. So by all means connect or don't. I'll get the notification that somebody has viewed my profile but I'm not paying to see who. Plus there isn't much on there. I think they'll come a time when I delete LinkedIn and possibly come back to it, maybe when I understand it a little better. Like how everyone recycled twitter.

But for now, it's a no from me.