LinkedIn has been with me throughout my entire career. It was always that kind of friend you’re happy to bump into from time to time, but you don’t need to see every day (or even every week).
This social network, however, was mainly a pond where interesting fish were caught – read: candidates. It was the place where supply and demand in the job market met.
People connected, enticed each other into companies, and occasionally posted something. All fine. But when the market in the Czech Republic “flipped” in 2016 – as I like to call it – LinkedIn absolutely exploded. I’ll explain in the following lines.
PS: Take the following article mostly as the recollections of a middle-aged man despairing over the current state of the LinkedIn bubble.
LinkedIn 2016/2017
I dare to say that the Czech labor market went through a major transformation sometime at the end of 2016. Until then, we could sift through resumes with a pitchfork and always comfortably find ten candidates to choose from. It was a great time for companies, but worse for candidates.
That’s when a certain bad habit started: companies, with the rise of ATS systems, became too lazy to inform candidates and simply stopped replying. There were enough people, so why bother. Quick side note – even back then this approach was unacceptable, and today it applies twice as much. Anyway, moving on. Candidates were looking for jobs and companies were hiring. But then came a turning point, and along with the technology boom, a massive global hunger began for IT specialists and other qualified professions. Hiring was booming, companies competed in benefits and conditions, and the hunger was all-encompassing. This demand drove unemployment down to the second-lowest worldwide, right after Singapore. And then the people “ran out.”
The market turned around, and suddenly companies had to work hard to find people for their roles. Many people also started retraining, and technological progress continued.
2017-2019
Between 2017 and 2019, many recruitment agencies popped up in our market, and internal recruiters started sourcing like crazy. Networking and events grew massively, as you know.
Unfortunately, shady practices like scraping resumes also appeared, and they remain with us to this day. Sadly. Still, I can’t help but praise GDPR, which protected us in Europe quite well, especially compared to the USA, where spam is far more noticeable. In 2017, Microsoft’s acquisition from the previous year fully showed its effects. New features and tools appeared, PPC campaigns were upgraded, while customer support declined sharply. However, Microsoft did manage to crack down on data scraping.
In practice, this meant that with tools like PhantomBuster, you could easily download all Czech profiles and spam them endlessly. That is precisely why even the LinkedIn Recruiter license now comes with strict limits on how many profiles you can view, contact, etc.
When we move to 2019, we also talk about another phenomenon – Employer Branding.
Everyone was talking about it. Everyone had to have their own brand, show what they were doing, and most importantly – post! It didn’t matter if it was empty clichés, just post! Like mushrooms after rain, experts on employer branding appeared, and companies adopted a new marketing style that was supposed to be authentic, though we all know how it often turned out (with a few exceptions).
2020-2023
Between 2020 and 2023, LinkedIn had already filled itself with users, and in the Czech Republic alone, there were around two million – an impressive achievement. Around 2020, something interesting happened. There were as many recruitment agencies and headhunters on the Czech market as castles and chateaux – about two thousand.
During these years, employer branding continued at full speed. You can probably see where I’m going with this. Posts multiplied like mushrooms after rain, and hardly a day went by without getting multiple inbox messages about having a suit tailored, or being invited to a series of “casual” calls where someone pitched their product. The main feed often contained gems like a salesperson taking a photo of his watch on the steering wheel of his Mercedes, writing about how success speaks louder than words – and other pearls like that.
Fortunately, some people and companies caught on to these trends and showed that it could be done authentically and well. Branding often showed itself in smarter sourcing, for example, by creating a landing page with information about the role, company, or product, and sending it directly to candidates instead of posting yet another message about how employees appreciated branded office supplies. During these years, job ad quality finally started improving – although now, with AI, it’s rapidly declining again, but I digress. All in all, LinkedIn had reached its absolute peak. That is, before the fall.
2024- ??
As the saying goes – then it all became too much. If you opened LinkedIn last year or this year at least once a day, you know that if you really had to think about what valuable content you saw and actually took away, you’d probably struggle to name much. At least that’s how it is for me, and I sincerely hope it’s different for you.
With the rise of AI came a massive problem of AI-generated content. Not a day goes by without someone posting a “revolutionary” post about how you can let AI write and even post on LinkedIn for you. As a result, bullshit on our timelines grew exponentially, and the suffering began. Many people still think brand-building means constantly being visible, constantly collecting likes, constantly posting. LinkedIn has inflated into monstrous proportions, and what it now represents looks like the clinical death of a once fairly serious, work-focused social network.
It would be nice to end this article on a positive note, but I won’t lie. I don’t think the trend will be positive at all. Sales spam will only get worse, more sales messages will keep coming, we’ll read more AI-generated content, and as long as it makes money, why would anything change? From a business perspective, this new era makes perfect sense for Microsoft, and it’s hardly surprising. YouTube is facing the same thing with AI content. The only major challenge that remains is security. The security of our data. Data is power, and power is money.
So, I’ll conclude with just one thing: On LinkedIn, you really don’t need to post constantly to be interesting. It’s enough to have a well-filled-out profile and occasionally share something that actually brings value to others. That’s what it’s all about – the best form of sharing is the one where, through our contribution, we provide value to others.
Well said! LinkedIn has become more about visibility theater than meaningful professional connection.
I’d add that with AI assistants dominating candidate research now, LinkedIn posts might be losing their influence as source material for employer brand discovery. My sense (backed my data from my company) is AI leans much more on Glassdoor reviews, Reddit discussions, and career site content—which is a game-changer for how we think about employer branding.