Business Social Networking: All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go
In a jobs economy that has become something of a grim joke, nothing seems quite so bleak as the digital job seeker’s all-but-obligatory LinkedIn account. In the decade since the site launched publicly with a mission “to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful,” the glorified résumé-distribution service has become an essential stop for the professionally dissatisfied masses. The networking site burrows its way into users’ inboxes with updates spinning the gossamer dream of successful and frictionless advancement up the career ladder. Just add one crucial contact who’s only a few degrees removed from you (users are the perpetual Kevin Bacons in this party game), or update your skill set in a more market-friendly fashion, and one of the site’s 187 million or so users will pluck you from a stalled career and offer professional redemption. LinkedIn promises to harness everything that’s great about a digital economy that so far has done more to limit than expand the professional prospects of its user-citizens.
In reality, though, the job seeker tends to experience the insular world of LinkedIn connectivity as an irksome ritual of digital badgering. Instead of facing the prospect of interfacing professionally with a nine-figure user base with a renewed spring in their step, harried victims of economic redundancy are more likely to greet their latest LinkedIn updates with a muttered variation of, “Oh shit, I’d better send out some more résumés.” At which point, they’ll typically mark the noisome email nudge as “read” and relegate it to the trash folder.
Which is why it’s always been a little tough to figure out what LinkedIn is for. The site’s initial appeal was as a sort of self-updating Rolodex—a way to keep track of ex-coworkers and friends-of-friends you met at networking happy hours. There’s the appearance of openness—you can “connect” with anyone!—but when users try to add a professional contact from whom they’re more than one degree removed, a warning pops up. “Connecting to someone on LinkedIn implies that you know them well,” the site chides, as though you’re a stalker in the making. It asks you to indicate how you know this person. Former coworker? Former classmate? Fine. “LinkedIn lets you invite colleagues, classmates, friends, and business partners without entering their email addresses,” the site says. “However, recipients can indicate that they don’t know you. If they do, you’ll be asked to enter an email address with each future invitation.”
You can try to lie your way through this firewall by indicating you’ve worked with someone when you haven’t—the equivalent of name-dropping someone you’ve only read about in management magazines. But odds are, you’ll be found out. I’d been confused, for instance, about numerous LinkedIn requests from publicists saying we’d “worked together” at a particular magazine. But when I clicked through to their profiles, I realized why they’d confidently asserted this professional alliance into being: the way to get to the next rung is to pretend you’re already there. If you don’t already know the person you’re trying to meet, you’re pretty much out of luck.
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