A WOMAN IN THE CITY

Once upon a time in the professional world, there was no LinkedIn. Then, once upon a time, LinkedIn existed but no one cared. It was fashionable to ask if one had tried Facebook in those years, but rarely did one think of checking a LinkedIn profile.

A couple of years later, someone asked me to give him a recommendation on LinkedIn. I was like, why not. But I never asked for any endorsement or recommendation myself. As Gen Z might be doing now for LLMs, I was happily ignoring social media including LinkedIn, as background noise.

I could not be any more wrong.

I was above this network I thought. It’s a not a virtual network which will get me a job. And why do I need thousands of connections I don’t know? I don’t need that to find a job.

A few years later, the platform became bigger, but I went out of my way to curate my connections to the strict minimum.

You see, I had two unsettling experiences by then. I had a minimal exposure on social media (i.e. none), except LinkedIn. And even though I ticked all the privacy settings: 1) LinkedIn got hacked and my name and work experience became visible on these random career websites; 2) People started contacting me on my email which was supposed to be private on LinkedIn.

As someone who really believes in data privacy – thank you GDPR in Europe and UK – this was a shock. I trimmed down my LinkedIn even more, and for a number of years, was barely conscious I still had an account.

For some, it might seem as if I am talking about pre-historical periods, periods where the Homo-LinkedInian did not exist. It was the best of times, it was the age of wisdom, and now we have the worst of times, the age of foolishness where AI slop is meeting LinkedIn. (As a side note, for the literary-minded, yes, I do pepper my writing with famous literature quotes sometimes. I will explain why in a separate post)

So fast forward many years, here I am. Seeking to completely change fields within the financial system. And what is the first thing recruiters or job applications ask? Your LinkedIn profile.

So I resisted, and then convinced myself I had to do it. So I opened LinkedIn and this is how it all started.

I reviewed my LinkedIn profile… and realised how much can change in just a few years.

New experiences. New challenges. New lessons.

Sometimes we’re so focused on the next goal that we forget to recognise the progress we’ve already made.

Your LinkedIn profile is more than an online CV.
It’s your professional story.

And if you are wondering what the hell were the above five sentences: You’re right. I just asked an AI chatbot whilst writing this blog post “Can you please write me two short paras of a LinkedIn post about someone who had to review their LinkedIn profile, and optimise it for maximum LinkedIn’s algorithm engagement”.

That is how everyone now writes these days: short sentences, empty words, generic punch lines. The onslaught of posts written in this style is enough to make someone’s brain go to the drain (hommage to Cypress Hill here).

But I persevered. Mainly because I had no choice, I needed to have a complete and clear LinkedIn profile if I had any hopes of changing careers, but also because I cleared all the interviews for a dream job and was told no because “my public presence was too scarce for them to get a feel of whether my identity would fit”.

Which, to translate in layman’s terms, I needed to engage with LinkedIn content, beef up my profile, post content and give to the world a sample of my writing and who I was. This was confirmed by anyone I spoke to in the new field, recruiters, senior executives, peers…

So I went in there and did it, and what an experience it had been.

First, I was not prepared by the amount of “experts” on LinkedIn. As an expert in a few fields myself, it was daunting. The way I would describe my first few months on LinkedIn was a state of constant frustration and sense of unfairness.

Whenever I opened LinkedIn, immediately I would see a suggested post liked by hundreds, sometimes thousands, by a so-called expert and recoil at the amount of generic statements, completely bland sentences or worse, wrong and erroneous analysis.

Blinded by my deep resentment against the universe, I would then go and check the profiles, and be even more aggravated when I see their glorified titles and accomplishments, impeccable featured posts and curated photos.

In my head I was like why them? why not me? why does everyone like what they say? It is [fill the blank with one or all of wrong/misleading/narcistic/dangerous/bland/obviously written by AI/plagiarism].

Not my proudest moment, but it took me months to overcome these negative and frankly not becoming feelings.

I don’t quite remember what triggered it, probably a well-meaning friend kind feedback, but one day I woke up resolved that if LinkedIn is a must, then I must learn how to use it and not be impacted by the noise. And without knowing then what I was doing, but just ignoring my negative thoughts and applying my own two cents, I did three things that somewhat changed my experience of it:

• I started engaging with posts that I respected. I liked solid analysis, robust expertise, insightful (and non-AI!) written pieces. I commented if I had anything to add in a brief and pertinent manner. And I closed and removed from my feed posts I disliked or that I judged were polluting my feed. I also removed from my contacts those who tended to over-post bland content.
• I started posting. Not a lot, maybe once to three times per month. I disregarded what all AI advised me to do to cater to the LinkedIn’s own AI algorithm, and posted my own writing. And yes, I use convoluted long complex sentences some times, and that’s fine.
• I remembered a crucial thing. Behind the accounts there are people. People like me. Experts and long career professionals who want to be heard, who want to share their knowledge, who are looking for a job, who want to change careers, or simply who are passionate about what they do. Young professionals who are looking for help, guidance and mentorship. Academic who want to share their research. Mission driven people who try to change things for the better, when they can. So I engaged with some of them, and to my surprise, I formed new friendships. People whose interests are similar to mine, and who send me and receive from me the occasional research paper or regulatory consultation on a number of financial system topics.

So where did that get me? I still experience the occasional LinkedIn stress, there is just too much AI content on that platform to be able to erase it completely. But my feed is much better.

I have learned so much from so many people. I discovered opportunities. I have now a notable number of contacts, out of which I know at least 80% personally even if they are from afar, because we connected by other means, whether a video call or an attended conference, or a coffee if we happened in each other’s city.

It’s not perfect, and I do sometimes browse the LinkedIn Lunatics Reddit feed to feel good about myself, even though I know this is probably just a stress mitigation mechanism.

More recently, despite all these positives, I increasingly think I am more used than a user, as I am still very conscious that by posting in this platform I am providing it high quality content on which to train its own AI.

I still have to consciously take breaks from the platform. And I sometimes fear I could be associated in any ways to all the charlatans on the platform.

I do hope it will change, and I do wish there was an alternative. I was also curious if there were any analyses on LinkedIn data and users’ experience.

Surprisingly, there is not a lot of research on the topic, though I did find some.

First, I found research that supported what I was told, namely that the frequency of usage was more strongly related to networking benefits on LinkedIn that the number of contacts (See Davis and al (2020) [1]). The same study finds that adding contacts is only beneficial if these profiles are a well-thought thoroughly researched contacts, with which useful relationships could be developed.

Two other more recent studies (see [2] and [3]) looked at whether LinkedIn increased social comparison anxiety and stress (with a focus on small samples of graduates and young professionals in the Netherlands and Germany).

The first paper (see [2]) showed that social comparison on LinkedIn enhanced career-related self-efficacy and reduced job search anxiety, as seeing peers’ successes can be inspiring.

But another study (see [3]) suggested that frequent exposure to others’ accomplishments may create feelings of urgency and inadequacy. Klein (2024) noted that individuals with higher self-efficacy can navigate LinkedIn more confidently, which lowers anxiety. The findings also revealed that active LinkedIn use correlated with increased future anxiety, while self-efficacy was linked to decreased future anxiety, highlighting its protective role. Social comparison was found to be a key factor mediating the relationship between active LinkedIn use and future anxiety.

An interesting paper (Cheikh-Ammar & Jabagi (2025), see [5]) called this tension between stress and benefits the “LinkedIn’s dilemma”. Using a sample of students, it found that LinkedIn induced well-being in students as it provided digital support and a sense of belongingness and competence. But that LinkedIn was also found to generate stress driven by excessive presence and engagement demand, and privacy threats.

All these papers, due to their focus on graduates and young professional, recommended that universities include in their curriculum guidance on a correct use of LinkedIn and tools to support well-being whilst using it.

Another paper (Primack and al 2016) focusing on young professionals found that, compared with those who did not use LinkedIn, participants using LinkedIn at least once per week had significantly greater odds of increased depression (see [5]).

Unfortunately, I could not find a lot of literature with large samples of older more experienced professional, but I did come across an academic research that found LinkedIn increased professional self-focus and triggered imposter syndrome.

And that leads us to the AI slop that is now pervasive in LinkedIn, which in my view contributes to a worse experience overall, unless significant time is spent curating one’s feed.

In an article by Medium from earlier this year, Paulo Delgado described how he felt much better after he deleted all social media platforms from his phone, mainly because of LinkedIn, an app he loved. As a writer, the AI slop was too much for him and he described how navigating LinkedIn felt empty and how he suspected that humans deserted LinkedIn and when still there, engaged much less with it because of all the AI bots written posts.

I did also find an article from HBR (see Groysberg and Lin [7]), which actually analyzed a sample of 1,741 executives and their Digital Professional Presence (DPP) and found that junior professionals benefit more from a DPP than senior executives. They also find (surprisingly for me) that women and minorities actually benefit from a good and robust DPP (measured by higher salary for one standard deviation of better online presence).

I am now totally LinkedIned, mainly for the lack of any other alternative.

I still hold some (small) hope that the platform may improve. But just in case, I am not posting this blog on it, but on BlueSky.

For now, I try to manage my visibility and my well-being to achieve my objectives of career change. It’s ironic that if LinkedIn presence ends up helping me achieve that goal, I would be out of it.

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Sources:

[1] Davis, J., Wolff, H.-G., Forret, M. L., & Sullivan, S. E. (2020). Networking via LinkedIn: An examination of usage and career benefits. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 118, 103396.

[2] Westermann, C. A. (2024). Exploring the impact of Social Comparison on the relationship between LinkedIn Engagement and Future Anxiety while controlling for Self-efficacy [Bachelor’s thesis, University of Twente]. UT Student Theses.

[3] Klein, S. (2024). Beyond Networking: Does Social Comparison on LinkedIn Influence Job Search Anxiety by Reducing Career-Related Self-Efficacy of Graduate Students? [Master’s thesis, Erasmus University Rotterdam]. Erasmus University Thesis Repository. https://thesis.eur.nl/pub/74979/

[4] Cheikh-Ammar, M., & Jabagi, N. (2025). LinkedIn’s dilemma: Navigating stress and well-being on professional networking platforms. Internet Research, 35(7), 71–90. doi.org

[5] Primack, B. A., Shensa, A., Escobar-Viera, C. G., Barrett, E. L., Sidani, J. E., Colditz, J. B., & James, A. E. (2016). Associations between internet-based professional social networking and emotional health. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 19(10), 580–586. doi.org

[6] LinkedIn Has an AI Problem. And People Are Noticing. | by R. Paulo Delgado | Medium

[7] Research: Can a More Detailed LinkedIn Profile Boost Your Salary?

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