Is it great to connect? The many lies of LinkedIn

For reasons that remain a mystery to me, I recently made the mistake of logging into my LinkedIn only to be greeted by a series of messages so intensely positive I felt terrible for having missed them.

What to make of poor Anthony? A Strategic Business Consultant who had reached out months ago to let me know that it’s great to have like-minded HR leaders from the industry. Were we like-minded? It’s hard to say. Do I work in HR? Definitely not.

Welcome to a world of toxic positivity, where ‘team players’ and ‘thought leaders’ are continually energised and thrilled by their own success but mostly excited to witness your downfall. Credit: Michael Howard

Then there was Eugene, a Senior Digital Marketing Manager, who explained that to be the best, you need to learn from the best! Assuming he was the best, Eugene also promised to show me the ins and outs of LinkedIn and seemed very keen to know where I would like to start my learning journey.

However, my favourite query came from Jean, who was presumably too busy to drill down on the details and instead settled for: Dear Sir/Madam, it’s great to connect!

Is it great, though? Not to target Jean unfairly, but the Sir/Madam catch-all didn’t exactly make me feel special. In fact, it’s fair to assume Jean had blasted out a thousand “Great to connect!” messages in the hope some unsuspecting Sir or Madam might take the bait.

Spend an hour on LinkedIn and you will inevitably cross paths with a version of the people listed above – the self-described change makers and thought leaders who claim their only intention is to figure out what really makes people tick if only they’d take the time to stop and listen.

LinkedIn has long occupied a strange position on the constantly shifting social media spectrum.

Millions of us use LinkedIn but no one really seems sure why.Credit: Alamy

Not as shallow as Instagram, not as argumentative as Twitter, not as irrelevant as Facebook, and not as confusing as TikTok, LinkedIn is a curious outlier.

A lot of people are on it – according to a 2022 study, it is the third most popular platform in the country after Facebook and YouTube – but no one knows what the hell is going on. According to LinkedIn’s mission statement, the platform exists to manage your professional identity, build and engage with your network, and access knowledge, insights and opportunities.

That all sounds great in theory, but logging on to LinkedIn increasingly feels like going to a friend’s party only to find yourself trapped in a conversation with a stranger. You’d love to congratulate your pal Julie on her new job if only this guy would stop banging on about how AI has transformed his corporate coaching business.

This obsessive focus on accomplishments has transformed LinkedIn from a platform for managing your professional identity into a platform for managing your professional lies.

Earlier this year, US-based salesman Bryan Shankman went viral after using his recent engagement to talk about sales strategy in a LinkedIn post.

“I proposed to my girlfriend this weekend,” Shankman wrote in the caption before segueing into his business strategy. “Here’s what it taught me about B2B sales!”

Sadly, we’ve come to expect this kind of behaviour from the Bryans of the world (they’re the ones who actually pay for Premium), but what’s worse is when the people you know (and love) are selling versions of themselves you barely recognise.

On Saturday night, they drunkenly character-assassinate their colleagues over dinner, and on Monday, they post lengthy LinkedIn blogs about successful team-building exercises.

Perhaps the strangest thing about LinkedIn is not the people you know masquerading as respectable corporate types but the people you barely know being too familiar. Only on LinkedIn will you get a message from your old manager at Boost Juice asking how things have been over the past 15 years.

My wife found herself in this exact situation last week when she was made redundant, only to be forced to dust off her LinkedIn logins and pen the obligatory farewell post.

Nothing brings people out of the woodwork like a redundancy announcement, and it was hard not to notice that as much as LinkedIn positions itself as a platform to celebrate success, it’s also trained us to take advantage of others’ downfalls.

Sorry you got fired, but I recently got hired! Credit: Marija Ercegovac/iStock

Comments rolled in by the hundreds, but amid the outpouring of genuine support, a few LinkedIn vultures sniffed opportunity: “Sorry to hear the news. I would love it if you could check out my profile!”

Rather than comment publicly, I did the professional thing and sent my wife a direct message with Jean’s contact details, thinking she could be the exact Sir/Madam they needed. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from LinkedIn, a good worker never misses the opportunity to connect.

Find more of the author’s work here. Email him at [e-mail] or follow him on Instagram at @thomasalexandermitchell and on Twitter @_thmitchell.

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