Is LinkedIn Losing Its Usefulness for Recruiters?
Scroll through your LinkedIn feed and you may just stumble upon a post that feels different because of how personal it is. It’s not an announcement of a promotion or me, once again here to share the incredible content created by the People Managing People team with you. No this is real. This is… more
Nevermind, it’s another story about what a seemingly random life event taught someone about the basic premise of their work.
If you’ve spent any amount of time on LinkedIn, you’ll have seen your share of this brand of self indulgence somewhere. A lure is dangled which promises you a window into someone’s ever so fascinating reality. Not their work achievements, but who they are as a person.
And then it begins… the performance written in a line by line cadence in an attempt to create tension, or at its most basic, present a series of incomplete thoughts leading to an invitation to entrust your business, career, or future to them. Here, let me show you an example.
But if this shameless self promotion didn’t satisfy your appetite for social media sins, just look for the copies with variations of this post in which someone includes a picture of a tricycle that appears to have been wrecked, a cutesy version of satire if you will. If that fails, just keep scrolling.
Is This Useful?
Scroll through enough of this and you begin to wonder just how useful all of this is. For a tool used to build personal networks, help people seek new opportunities and recruit new employees, a certain level of vanity is to be expected from what you see on LinkedIn.
Certainly, you’d never want to see the vulgarity people put on X, or the Facebook posts of old that were overly revealing of one’s personal problems. But there comes a point when we’re spending more time sifting through nonsense than gleaning at least some understanding of what value a person can bring to an organization or why we should consider their insights valuable.
How much of what we see there is as fictitious as the content we stream on Netflix in our downtime?
“I approach LinkedIn profiles with a healthy dose of skepticism,” Julie Klin, VP of HR at Copper says. “They often serve as polished ‘book covers’ rather than an authentic representation of the individual. Many profiles and resumes these days are outsourced or crafted by AI for appearances to get a foot in the door.”
Klin’s point about AI is becoming a greater concern. Since the arrival of ChatGPT, job seekers have been using the technology to keyword stuff their resumes in an attempt to "beat the ATS" prescreening most companies use. It's no wonder recruiters are looking closer at LinkedIn profiles.
A well versed user of AI, however, can craft a profile that makes them appear endlessly motivated, results driven, data savvy, strategically focused and whatever other self proclaimed plaudits people were headlining resumes with just a few short years ago.
With the means to manipulate how people see us in a professional capacity, what can LinkedIn actually tell us about a person? What does their activity really say about them?
Digging Through the Mess
For most hiring managers, they don’t need or even want to get to know someone in all their complexity before an interview. What they’re looking for are signs that the person has the skills, experience and qualifications necessary to potentially fill a role. Going beyond that can create more problems.
“I try not to dig too much into their social activity as it may open us up to liability,” Brenda Woodard, VP of Talent & Development at Premier Talent Partners said. “Learning too much about a candidate could create a bias in the recruiting process. I look to see when they have recently engaged with posts. Things like helping their network be seen or playing an active role in their community.”
It’s tempting to believe that we can understand a person better by looking at things like their activity and who they’ve worked with previously, but the fact remains, no social platform will ever give you enough context about a person’s professional life to fully understand what you’re seeing.
The more important task of determining if the person possesses the type of thinking that aligns with how a team within your organization works takes time and personal interaction. For that reason, Klin recommends taking what you see or don’t see with a pinch of salt.
“High performers may be too busy excelling in their roles to focus on posting or engaging online,” she says. “For me, the real value comes from prioritizing direct engagement. You can see how they build rapport and engage in conversation, get a clearer sense of who they are, how they think, how they might fit into the role and, most importantly, our company culture.”
As for gleaning any value from what you see on a profile, the best use of that information is simply to steer your conversations with the person when you meet.
“I wouldn't say it shapes my expectations of the candidate, but does provide other talking points,” Woodard says. “I can understand things such as their interests, groups they are a part of, or mutual connections we may have.”
The AI Challenge
As I’m sure you’ve heard from a LinkedIn post, AI is changing how we work and when we work. It’s only natural then that it changes how we look for work too.
As the technology becomes more complex and integrated into the way we do everything, you’ll see it play out on job search platforms and in applicant tracking systems in ways you might have never imagined.
“The AI infiltration of LinkedIn is a perfect microcosm of the broader changes we're seeing in employment,” says Deborah Perry Piscione, CEO of the Work3 Institute and co-author of Employment is Dead: How Disruptive Technologies are Revolutionzing the Way We Work.
“The platform has become a meta-game where AI-enhanced profiles compete with AI-powered recruiting tools, creating what I call a ‘synthetic networking’ environment. What's particularly interesting is the dissolution of traditional professional identity markers,” she said.
Beyond the obvious markers of skills, values, goals, etc. the identity markers Piscione is referring to include things like:
- Title
- Your employer
- Years of experience
- Linear career path
"These were markers of professional identity for decades and decades,” she says. “But now? We're seeing people, particularly among Gen Z, who are simultaneously successful Substack writers, web3 consultants, and DAO contributors. Their real impact and earnings might come primarily from their Discord community leadership or their AI prompt engineering side business, not their "official" job. Traditional markers simply can't capture this multidimensional reality.”
When everyone can have an AI-polished LinkedIn profile and generated content, those traditional signals lose their differentiating power. In theory, what matters increasingly is verifiable impact - actual projects shipped, problems solved, communities built, revenue generated - regardless of formal role or employer.
“We're moving toward what I call "proof-of-work identity" - where your professional value is demonstrated through a portfolio of real outcomes rather than institutional affiliations or titles,” Piscione says. “This is why we're seeing the rise of alternative credentials, from Github commits to NFT badges for completed projects to reputation scores in professional DAOs.”
Outcomes and someone’s personal impact may be considered subjective by some. For this reason, as traditional markers fade, Piscione believes authenticity becomes even more valuable. The ability to show genuine, verifiable impact in multiple domains is the new professional currency.
Ultimately Piscione sees LinkedIn’s time as a recruiting tool fading due to the fact that “it’s built on an outdated assumption that careers are linear and skills are static.”
“LinkedIn's recruiting tools, while still widely used, represent the sunset of Web2 professional networking,” she said. “In reality, we're seeing the emergence of what we term ‘fluid professional identities’ in the book, where individuals might simultaneously be creators, consultants, and community leaders. LinkedIn's infrastructure struggles to capture this new reality.”
The Executive Shine
Perhaps no other group is as skilled at playing the LinkedIn game as those in the C-suite. Due to their title, influence and perceived importance, they’re able to amass huge followings which they then have to communicate with, both for their personal brand as well the organization’s.
But what happens when they leave and end up bouncing between organizations? If you're looking for an external C-suite hire, how can you gauge the authenticity of their LinkedIn identity? Considering CHROs estimate around 12% of external C-suite hires end up failing, how can you trust your ability to assess C-suite candidates is sound?
As executive candidates integrate AI into their own image maintenance workflow, what you have is a recipe for making a sort of “all shine and no substance” hire at the highest levels of the organization.
“It's actually a symptom of what we predict about the decoupling of professional value from traditional employment signals,” says Piscione. “Executives are particularly prone to this because they're still operating under the old paradigm where career narrative matters more than verifiable outcomes. This is precisely why we're seeing the rise of blockchain-verified credentials and reputation systems.”
As a result of all this, Piscione predicts that:
Traditional job websites and platforms will matter less as people start building their careers and creating value in decentralized online communities and Web3 networks that require special access tokens.
If you’re like me and you need a translation there, let’s just put it this way. The future of hiring is changing quickly and it’s going to be more community based than ever before, so get your network of close connections, not just passive LinkedIn connections, ready. Social recruiting is going beyond social media.
As for LinkedIn, this isn’t the first hurdle it faced. Whether it’s the recalibration of networking from personal to more B2B focuses, culture clashes between its members or changing of its business model, the company has had its share of market shifts to navigate. But one thing is for sure, its monopoly over the career growth social media space will fade if this is at the core of its future.
What's Next?
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