On paper, LinkedIn sounds like the number one destination for professionals who want to grow their network, find jobs, message others, find news about their profession, find conferences etc. But in reality, it’s not even close.

I learnt about LinkedIn while I was at University (which was eleven years ago), I was told that LinkedIn was Facebook but for professionals. We were all encouraged to sign up, and add each other.

How very professional.

I remember being told that LinkedIn isn’t the place for holiday photos, or posts about what you did over the weekend. That’s what Facebook was for, LinkedIn is for professional posts.

Turns out, that’s no longer the case.

After having an account on LinkedIn for eleven years, I have arrived at one conclusion; I don’t like LinkedIn.

At first, it was okay. Plenty of posts about work, self development, jobs, that sort of thing. But now it’s unrecognisable. LinkedIn has turned into yet another social media website. Complete with its own influencers.

LinkedIn has the potential to be a great place for professionals, from those who are starting out in their careers to those who have been in work for several years. But LinkedIn has turned their attention away from the original intended audience towards influencers.

If you look at the about page, the mission is apparently to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”. Let’s keep this in mind.

There are a few key things that just drive me nuts about LinkedIn.

Applying for jobs

I’ve applied to jobs on LinkedIn for years and I’ve had a small amount of success. Very rarely would I get a response of some kind from my application. And when I was unemployed last year, I decided to give the ‘easy apply’ feature a try. I mean, why wouldn’t I? It’s designed to make applying for jobs faster by using resumes you’ve already uploaded, and questions you’ve answered in as little clicks as possible.

Sounds good, right? I can now apply to more jobs faster! It turns out it’s not easy in getting your application viewed by recruiters. I can count on one hand how many applications have been viewed through easy apply.

It got to a point where I ended up finding a job on LinkedIn, and then applying to the role via the company’s website directly as I’d get a response of some kind instead of relying on LinkedIn.

During my job search last year, I ended up subscribing to LinkedIn Premium to enhance my search. LinkedIn would identify where I would be a top candidate, mark jobs as a top choice and being able to message hiring managers. And none of these features worked for me.

Plus, with premium you are able to see how many applicants there are for a job. This is honestly a terrifying feature to have as it makes you realise how tough the job market truly is. I spent nearly three months looking for work last year, the job market was incredibly challenging then and now.

The constant cringeworthy, rampant virtue signalling and unbelievable posts.

I know (and hope) we’ve seen that post about how someone learnt B2B sales by proposing to his girlfriend, the crying CEO or some ridiculous advice. These are just a few examples of some of the awful posts that you see on the site.

But it just doesn’t stop.

From truly unbelievable stories to some bizarre and awful pieces of life advice (or in some cases, people will just quote one of their own posts with ‘Agree?’ slapped on the end), LinkedIn has turned into a wasteland of awful content.

None of it has to do with work or professional development, and none of it interests me whatsoever. It’s starting to get harder in finding quality posts or content that I’m interested in.

It’s turning into yet another social media platform

From testing vertical videos (yes, really), to having games and even trying Snap style stories. LinkedIn has tried it all. The platform has also added a creator mode to create more influencers (I still don’t understand why you’d want to be an influencer on LinkedIn).

For a platform that’s dedicated to professionals, it’s adding features that cater more to influencers, rather than the original audience. These new features don’t benefit me at all, and it just drives me away from the platform.

I just feel that LinkedIn has forgotten what its purpose is. Remember what LinkedIn’s mission was? To “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”. I don’t think these features are achieving that.

To me, LinkedIn should be the digital business card and dedicated platform for professionals in an industry. Don’t get me wrong, there are good posts on LinkedIn, but it’s just buried by the awful content I mentioned previously.

This is a great video explaining the madness of LinkedIn:

The useless notifications

You appeared in 11 searches this week.

More than half of LinkedIn members polled are ready for autumn. Are you?

Do remote workers miss out on workplace friendships?

What is even the point of these notifications?

The notifications bugged me so much that I ended up disabling them on my phone. And I absolutely don’t believe that I’m missing out on anything important. I’ll enable notifications again if I’m looking for work. And you know what? I don’t check LinkedIn as much now after disabling notifications.

Telling me that I turned up in searches this week is the LinkedIn equivalent of the nothing sandwich. I get that LinkedIn wants you to interact with the application but they could at least make the notifications useful in these scenarios.

And why do I care if members polled are ready for autumn?

Somebody viewed your profile!

Over the past year, I’ve had someone from a place I previously worked at consistently view my profile. I have no idea why or who, they don’t send me a message, but they just view my profile. I don’t think they view this website either by following a link on my profile or a previous post. They just view my LinkedIn profile every so often.

It surprises me how much this bugs me. This will be one of my personal mysteries in life, and I may never find out the answer to who keeps viewing my LinkedIn profile.

Of course, there is a way to find out who is viewing me, which is through LinkedIn Premium. But is it really worth the monthly subscription? No. I’m not paying £29.99 a month just to see who’s been looking at my profile.

Over time, I’ve started to think that views are somewhat pointless and give no value. I find more value in people messaging or emailing me.

AI that has no value

The trend of AI being added everywhere has come to LinkedIn as well, if you are subscribed to Premium that is. The AI features included with premium are:

• AI profile writing assistant
• AI powered insights on jobs
• AI messaging
• AI post drafts

All of these features are not only unappealing to me but also seem to pointless. If I’m writing a post or messaging someone, it should be me who is in control of writing, not AI. And I’m sure hiring managers don’t want to be messaged by someone who’s used AI to write their message, as in some way they wouldn’t be talking to the person who messaged them.

I also would feel uncomfortable in letting AI tell me if I’m ready to apply for a job or not. I’m quite confident in knowing if I would be ready to apply to a job or not. I don’t need AI to tell me that. There are also concerns of what if the AI model hallucinates or drafts the wrong message? It’s a reason why I still remain cautious when it comes to AI.

It just seems that AI is being slapped to LinkedIn in the hopes that it sticks.

LinkedIn can swamp your inbox

Somewhat recently I ended up going through the email notification settings for my LinkedIn account and I turned all of the emails off apart from jobs.

Everything else was of no use to me and these emails were taking up space in my inbox. So instead of having to delete them to claim back space, I figured that not receiving these emails at all would be the better move.

This seems related to the constant notifications that LinkedIn sends.

Is it really that bad? Is there nothing that I like about LinkedIn?

There are a few things that I do like about LinkedIn:

• LinkedIn Learning is an excellent platform. I’ve taken serval courses on there and it’s a joy to use every time. The quality of the courses are decent, and it covers topics like software development to social skills. Plus, being able to view a transcript for each video that can let me jump back to that point in the video is very useful. This might be the only reason why you should subscribe to LinkedIn Premium.
• Messaging is okay.

But that’s about it. I know it’s a short list, but I struggled to think of any positives to using LinkedIn.

I could mention jobs but it’s more than likely that those jobs will be posted on other platforms such as Indeed (which isn’t that great of a platform either to be honest).

On LinkedIn Premium

As I mentioned above, I did try LinkedIn Premium while I was searching for a job last year (and I also somehow ended up with a free year to Perplexity Pro from LinkedIn?) and honestly, it’s not worth the money.

The only feature I found useful outside of LinkedIn Learning was to enable a button that directly linked to this website. And the AI features included with premium are pointless.

Do I really want to pay £29.99 a month for a button and LinkedIn Learning? Only if there was a course that was highly recommended. But for courses, I tend to prefer to use platforms such as Udemy and Coursera.

And how many people pressed the button that lead to my website? I don’t know the exact number but it’s not enough to justify the cost of the monthly subscription.

I imagine if you’re a recruiter, then this might be slightly different and the benefits of subscribing to Premium are different than compared to a job seeker.

What would I change on LinkedIn?

More customisation

I wish that we could have more control on how things are presented on a profile. It would be nice if I could move sections on my profile, so I could move sections such as my licenses and certifications higher up. I’d also would like to change the order of how my certifications are displayed, that way I can showcase something I’m proud of to potential employers without them having to look through my profile.

Create feeds on the homepage

Bluesky allows users to create custom feeds which show posts from specific accounts. So you could have a feed dedicated to webcomics, another one about movies, and so on. This gives users more control on breaking up posts into something that’s manageable. And I think it would be handy on LinkedIn to have a feed of posts from those who you are connected to, another feed for companies you follow and so on.

Currently, you can sort your feed on LinkedIn by ‘Recent’ or ‘Top’, and I just feel that there’s a missed opportunity here to let users find posts that are more relevant to them easily.

An improved CV/resume PDF builder

You can export your profile as a PDF, and to be honest, it looks incredibly dull. You don’t have control on what the final output is like and I feel that there is an opportunity to improve it. From selecting specific certifications, skills to be highlighted and the overall look of the PDF, there is so much that can be done to improve this feature.

If LinkedIn is about helping professionals be successful, then surely having an improved resume builder to help users find jobs would be important, right?

Digital business card

I mentioned above about LinkedIn being a digital business card, and I thought it would be cool if you could create a card of your profile that is stored in your phone’s wallet application, which would mention a few things like your name, picture, role and a QR code to your profile. So if you were meeting someone and wanted to quickly share your profile, you could show your digital business card and let someone scan it with a camera or NFC.

This is definitely more of an experimental idea.

Will I keep LinkedIn?

I’ll keep it as I want to maintain a presence on there, as several roles in the past have come from recruiters on the platform, so the messaging service is somewhat useful. Plus it still serves as a ‘digital business card’ in many ways as I have verified my account on there. But I am somewhat tempted to delete it. Maybe I will in the future where I don’t see any value of having an account on there. I could also just deactivate it, and then reactivate it when I need it.

You could argue that my website and blog is my digital business card, and I would agree with you on that. I can add whatever I want to it, whenever. And I don’t need to pay £29.99 a month if I want a button. I have a button on the front page that allows anyone to send me an email, and I made it myself for free!

I just wish that LinkedIn remembered what its purpose was. To cater for the professional community. Instead, LinkedIn has favoured on being a terrible social network.