A friend recently asked me to help her look for a job. She wanted help writing a cover letter, a CV and an update on her LinkedIn profile. The first two tasks were easy, but the third? Not so much.
If, like me, you haven’t been on LinkedIn for a while, it is – for lack of a better word – weird, now. What used to be a perfunctory, professional space sitting in stark contrast to the oversharing of other social media, LinkedIn is now full of 1,000-word polemics from unqualified people (“here’s really what makes people tick” says a “wizard of wellbeing”), photos of holidays (“work hard, play hard!”) and empty motivational platitudes (“give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to code and …” OK, sorry, I did just make that one up). It’s all a bit cultish, and work is what is worshipped. Stepford Wives, employment edition.
LinkedIn even has its own language now. Spend more than five minutes on it and you’ll notice everyone parroting the same phrases. Seemingly everyone has a “proven track record for delivering results” and a “belief in integrated solutions” (one of those buzz phrases that makes less sense the more you think about it. Doesn’t everyone have a belief in integrated solutions? Or are there some people out there thinking: “I personally hate joined-up thinking”). Others have an emotive, possibly too-much-information story to share (“I failed my exams at school, got married young, got divorced young, but now I work at Google and have a spicy girlfriend”), and many want to “reach out” – please, no touching in the workplace! – to discuss unnamed “opportunities”.
Now, you may be reading this thinking: “Who cares? Let them have their space and stay off the platform if you don’t like it.” And ordinarily, I might agree. But then I watched my brilliant friend – my accomplished, talented friend – crumble in the face of it. Her journey has been non-linear: market stalls to magazines, counselling training and now HR. In my view, her work experience is diverse, rich and what makes her excellent at her job, but it doesn’t fit neatly in the boxes of LinkedIn. It upset her to try to upload her life into this format – where dates had to be applied and money assigned (how do you get around the mandatory “add date” for the experience of motherhood and informal childcare in your neighbourhood? Are you “freelancing” if you organise community art events for nothing but a sense of civic pride?). She felt uncomfortable trading in grandiose statements of “personal transformation”, even though she has been on more of a journey than many users on the platform. But job vacancy adverts increasingly say “apply with your LinkedIn”, and everyone in her field has joined the Stepford employees. I can see why she felt this is what she had to do – that employers would look for it, and she needed to be there; that if she didn’t compete, she’d be left behind.
Much has been written about how tech is changing how we see ourselves and each other. Instagram pushing unattainable beauty standards and lifestyles, Facebook fake news chipping away at people’s belief in institutions, an X format that reduces a complex thought to 280 characters (no wonder nuance is impossible!), turning all of us into outrage addicts. Dating apps have commodified and gamified those most human phenomena: love and desire. Yet somehow LinkedIn has been left out of the spotlight. But here’s my contention: I think it is doing something to us, shifting how we see our accomplishments, what we assign value to and what we don’t. And perhaps most chilling of all, it promotes the idea that we are all just brands, and we must always – always – be selling. Apparently, LinkedIn is now being used as a full social network, a place where people talk about their marriages, make friends and maybe even date. What does that tell us about our lives outside work? Do we even still have lives outside work at all?
Perhaps what is needed is a bit of real and refreshing honesty on LinkedIn. What could it look like, I wonder? I’ll go first.
Hello, I am Coco. I have a proven track record of not responding to text messages in a timely manner. I am a strategic thought leader, in that I have thoughts and I sometimes let them lead me, but not always. I didn’t fail my science GCSEs but I didn’t do as well in science as English, and that really has shaped all my career choices since. Predictable, really. I actually don’t think giving 100% every day is great; I think 80% is good and well-organised, and 100% only when necessary. Want to talk ideas to grow your business? Try me on WhatsApp, and I may reply.
• Coco Khan is a freelance writer and co-host of the politics podcast Pod Save the UK
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