LinkedIn or LinkedOut?
By Devapriya Menon
“Hey connections, I’m happy to announce that after two months of working 28 hours a day, and crossing the Nile in a canoe to get to the library, I finally found a job!”
If you’ve ever read something like this on LinkedIn, and I’m sure you have, read along to see why LinkedIn is actually pretty “LinkedOut” from real life.
The influx of ridiculously cringe-worthy posts is surprisingly not too avant-garde when it comes to the LinkedIn space. From absurd boasting to corporate gas-lighting, the once fine line between professional networking with self-branding and the apparent and difficult-to-believe ‘success’ stories, has now been blurred. Do not get me wrong, just as important networking is on LinkedIn, self-branding in terms of a professional candidature is vital too. You have to sell yourself, and prove your caliber and potential to the recruiters, isn’t that kind of the point? You have to be your authentic self and prove to the employers that you are an expert at what you do. Sometimes, this can be tailored to fit into the needs of a newbie or an intern.
However from time to time (or maybe most times), this gets lost in translation.
The very purpose of LinkedIn is to create a platform where job seekers can network with potential employers and host their resumes online. But some of us are known to deviate from rationality a little too effortlessly. Interestingly, the Rational Choice Theory in behavioral economics talks about how humans tend to deviate from rationality when presented with options under a condition of scarcity. They would choose the one that maximizes their self-satisfaction. Now, this can be used to validate why certain people choose to get too fixated on the idea of self-branding. Given the obviously mad competitiveness in the corporate world, which can give rise to employment, people sometimes tend to take, to quote Frost, “the road not taken”, to garner attention towards their profiles.
Here is the difference, illogical posts on LinkedIn that make it difficult for us readers to connect the dots and tend to be oversimplified and humorous, that they even get meme’d.
Overtly, some people tend to portray themselves as the ‘know-it-all’ candidates who eat knowledge pie for lunch and take wisdom shots at night. This mentality sometimes takes shape in the form of the corporate hierarchy. Once, an employer shared on LinkedIn about how he fired an intern only because he wore AirPods, further indicating that for someone to be qualified enough to wear them, they would have to work their way to earn it or, rather, they will be subject to getting fired. Damn, even by LinkedIn standards, that's too much.
Ironically, the ones who occupy a higher level in the hierarchy at corporations seem more intolerant. Hierarchy indeed gives structure to an organization. Still, when employers put up these posts on a space like LinkedIn, it instills a sense of dubiousness in the freshers in terms of their caliber.
Getting sucked into the rat race is something our generation and even those behind have romanticized. It is almost inevitable not to be part of this bittersweet journey that thrives on competition and zeal in the corporate world. But a positive development is that people are now beginning to see the corporate work culture charade and have begun to demand a more holistic work-life balance.
On platforms like LinkedIn, where some tend to scroll through success stories and job postings mindlessly, they often fail to realize how they are gradually embarking on a much more deceivingly appealing way ahead. An exhausting routine of investing their time, mental and even physical health, in return for money and if the hard-working bird gets the worm, a jump up the corporate ladder too. By keeping this in mind, the idea of rejecting X where X equals a much more tranquil environment and deciding to choose your challenges to reach those goals plays a key role. But this critical decision, combined with a readjusting of professional networking spaces like LinkedIn, results in an undesirable outcome.
The focus has to be on being true to your authentic self and mastering the art of bragging more appropriately, be it on LinkedIn or the physical world. Gain the experience, work on the skills, back your brags up with statistics and data. It should be looked at as a process of self-evolution and self-exploration. LinkedIn has to serve as a space that would illuminate job seekers and employers and herald them towards a more realistic approach towards the world of employment. A few profiles on LinkedIn often bend reality through posts that add more to the less appropriate version of bragging. The more apparent and broader the gap is between the message and truth, the more it gets subject to interpretation. Therefore, concise communication on LinkedIn is primary, as we are not looking at a social networking platform here.
Unfortunately, these posts loaded with the potential to stem outcomes unwished-for do not end here. Fraudsters thrive in a few corners of LinkedIn, and as they do, they send out fake job postings to potential job seekers by impersonating actual HR employees. Sadly, beneath these posts, one can find desperate people who put out their credentials and personal information to connect with these fictitious HR reps. Unfortunately, more often than not, despite the stringent privacy measures that they ensure you while joining, user information is readily available outside. Given the job market situation made worse by the pandemic, fraudsters tend to exploit the lives of those in utmost need of jobs and security.
Now one might be wondering how these easily negligible posts, emotionally loaded with cringe, can impact large scale users; after all, the whole of LinkedIn does not radiate this same energy. However, this perception is way too oversimplified. Research has shown that when people try to make sense of the world, they focus more on learning through negative experiences and outcomes. This would suggest that even the people wanting some meaning from their daily scroll on LinkedIn are likely to be sucked into the lure of these cringe-filled, half-baked, nonsensical posts. Sigh.
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