Way 1: The Job Search Marketplace & Recruiter Power#

The first way is by building a kind of digital shopping mall for people’s careers.

• LinkedIn is the biggest job search site in the world.
• Companies and recruiters pay LinkedIn directly to post job listings and make them more visible.
• When you apply for a job through LinkedIn, the employer gets your skills, experience, education, and job history all laid out neatly in the same way every time. This is a big leg up compared to just sending a resume through regular job sites like Indeed.
• Sure, that info should be on your resume anyway, but because LinkedIn presents it so standardly, recruiters can use computers to search for candidates way more easily.
• Getting a subscription to LinkedIn Recruiter costs $9,000 a year.
• But for that price, hiring managers and outside recruiters get a bunch of tools. They can search for people based on specific things they’re looking for, reach out to potential candidates directly, and advertise new jobs.
• For most companies, that $9,000 is a small price. Why? Because what they get back is like an all-you-can-eat buffet of possible people for their jobs.

Think about asking for a raise. If you tell your manager you might quit if you don’t get it, they weigh the cost of paying you more against the cost of finding someone new. Finding qualified people used to be much harder than it is now. But today, if you quit, they’re just a few search words away from finding a potentially perfect replacement from the biggest pool of career-focused people on the planet.

Hiring managers wouldn’t spend $9,000 a year on tools if they didn’t get their money’s worth. Having the ability to contact people who aren’t even actively looking for a job has given hiring managers a whole lot more power over you.

And that’s just the first reason!

Okay, real quick, before we keep going on how LinkedIn might be messing with your career, let’s talk about something else important… staying safe online.

Way 2: The Information Imbalance#

The second way LinkedIn might be messing with your career is by creating an unfair setup where potential employers know way more about you than you know about them.

LinkedIn is actually one of those things that you’re seeing more and more. It’s becoming a standard requirement or at least heavily requested on pretty much every job application these days. And that’s a big deal.

The main reason it’s a problem? LinkedIn just makes it way too easy for you to share too much information about yourself. A profile that’s considered ‘good’ on LinkedIn is supposed to have pretty much everything an employer could ever want to know about you.

But then you look at company pages… they hardly have any of the information you really want to know about a place you might work. Things like salary information are usually kept secret, and descriptions of what the job actually involves are just as vague as they are on every other job site. So, LinkedIn is basically handing companies a huge database of employee information without giving you much of anything useful in return.

It’s true that some jobs require you to sacrifice more than others, and you should know that going in. If you want to be a corporate lawyer or an investment banker, you have to accept that you’ll work really long hours and won’t have much personal time, especially when you’re starting out. Doctors make similar sacrifices going through years of medical school and residency. But, in exchange for all that hard work, they get a career path where they’re pretty much guaranteed to make a lot of money eventually.

It’s not fair to expect you to work just as hard and make the same kind of sacrifices as people in those fields if you don’t have the chance to make the same kind of money they do. And that connects to the third way LinkedIn impacts your career.

Way 3: The Self-Comparison Trap & Personal Development Spending#

This third way is also one of the company’s biggest ways to make money: It forces you to compare yourself to others.

We already know that spending too much time on social media isn’t great for your mental health. It makes you compare your normal, everyday life to the super-polished posts your friends and people you follow share, showing only their best moments. Instagram might make you feel bad about not spending three hours at the gym every day, but LinkedIn? It hits you right in the career insecurity.

Career coaches often tell people to make as many connections as possible on LinkedIn. Their reasoning is that it helps expand your network and makes your profile easier for people to find. From my own time in Investment Banking, I personally have over 1,000 connections on LinkedIn because, in my last few years in that field, connecting on LinkedIn became more common than just giving out a business card.

Now, my feed is full every day of what are basically just humblebrags. People talk about becoming the youngest partner at their law firm or being “thankful to have the honor to coordinate the synergistic digitization sprint for internal tools development enabling their company to pivot to fields of disruptive innovation while empowering the customer experience.” Yeah, that kind of stuff.

According to LinkedIn’s own numbers, only about 1 percent of their monthly users actually post anything on the site. Compare that to Facebook, where around 20 percent of users make at least one post a month.

Think about it: People don’t usually post pictures of their bad hair days on Facebook, and they definitely aren’t posting about their career setbacks or failures on LinkedIn. This can leave you, just scrolling through, with the feeling that everyone else is doing way, way better than you are. And who can blame them? Honestly, everyone on LinkedIn sounds like a perfect saint, according to what they post.

LinkedIn and the marketing teams who use the platform understand this insecurity completely. They know it’s one of the best ways to sell things. If you’re feeling shaky or insecure about your career, you’re much more likely to pay attention to ads selling things like Career Development training, lead generation services, or help finding a new job through recruitment. You’re also probably more willing to spend your own money on something that might help you earn more money in your career because it becomes easy to tell yourself it’s just an “investment in yourself.”

Surveys back up LinkedIn’s image. According to Insider Intelligence, which does an annual survey of 15,000 people, LinkedIn ranks really high among the social media platforms Americans trust the most. It was actually in the very top spot for four years straight, only recently getting nudged out by Pinterest. The company’s whole brand – being a professional place where professionals talk about professional stuff – really helps build that trust. Even though, under the hood, they’re using the same basic human feelings to sell ad space as every other social media site out there.

That’s not the main problem, though. I mean, as someone who makes videos, I get that a company that relies on getting people’s attention needs to make money from that attention to keep the lights on. LinkedIn brings in a specific, valuable crowd with high interest in certain things, and they should absolutely charge what advertisers are willing to pay for people to see their stuff. LinkedIn is even stricter about checking out advertisers than other platforms like Meta’s ad manager or Google AdSense.

The real problem this creates for your career is that it makes you feel like you constantly need to add more achievements to your profile just to stand out from the crowd.

Look at the market for self-improvement. According to Grandview Research, a company that studies markets, the American personal development market is worth $12 billion and is expected to grow by 4.1 percent each year over the next eight years. People are spending more of their own money and putting in their unpaid hours collecting certifications like they’re trading Pokemon gym badges.

Guess who loves this trend? Recruiters and hiring managers! They’re paid to find people and put them in jobs. How well a new hire actually does after they get the job often doesn’t matter as much to them. It’s much easier to convince the manager who will be responsible for the new person if they can point to a long list of certifications on their profile.

Is there proof that all this Career Development training actually helps people do their jobs better? Nope. There’s no evidence to suggest that. In fact, it seems the opposite might be true: People who chase after these kind of meaningless badges just to look good are actually more likely to switch jobs more often.

LinkedIn didn’t invent this pressure, but it definitely made it a lot worse. And sadly, that’s the standard you have to compete with now. That tiny 1 percent of people who actually post on LinkedIn? They’re setting the bar for working unpaid overtime, making their job the top priority, and blurring the lines between their work and personal lives. They do it to show off and boost their chances of getting a job. But because this is the main stuff getting shown on the world’s biggest professional network, companies and managers start to think it’s a normal thing to expect from everyone.

Way 4: The Culture of Corporate Worship#

The fourth way LinkedIn is impacting your career is by helping create this culture where people seem to worship the companies they work for.

Since posts on LinkedIn aren’t anonymous and people definitely want to keep their jobs, any post that even mentions a company is going to be overwhelmingly positive. Some companies even really push their staff to have a strong profile and be active on LinkedIn because they know it helps make the company look like a great place to work.

This whole ‘corporate worship’ thing isn’t just weird; it can actually hurt your career. Big companies are good at making people feel like they’re part of something huge and important, more than just trading their time and skills for money. Companies have been doing this for ages, even before LinkedIn existed. Think about Walmart employees having to do their company cheer every morning – that helps keep staff around. But LinkedIn has made it easy for companies to push this kind of awkward, cringe-y corporate worship out to everyone.

The huge amount of positive feedback companies get on LinkedIn also means they’re less likely to notice or admit where they have problems. It’s much easier for managers to deal with praise from people they know on their team than criticism from someone on an anonymous forum. A lot of managers don’t stop to think that they aren’t going to hear negative feedback from people who are just trying to move up in their careers. And that’s really the worst part.