A review of LinkedIn

I love an online product review and I thought it would be interesting to review LinkedIn.  Where do I start?  Putting my cards on the table, I am not a fan of LinkedIn, but I can’t imagine life without it.  In the process of using it to share my blog with a wider audience I have benefited from the tool, discovered more content that I like and have fallen into a routine whereby I check it at least once a day.  My aim is to provide a fair review to describe what I think it is, who I think it is for and how well it works in practice.

To start with the obvious point, LinkedIn is a social media platform.  From memory it didn’t start that way but has morphed into social media with the addition of new features.  There is very little real competition amongst social media platforms.  Facebook is the grandaddy and saw off early rivals like Google+.  Instagram, X, Tik Tok and LinkedIn each have their own niche: images, micro-blogging, user generated videos, and business networking.  The only competition is when a new entrant with a new idea hits the market and Meta either buys it (Instagram and Whatsapp) or tries to copy the features (Snap and Tik Tok) into their own services.  It would be very difficult for a challenger to launch a similarly targeted service and scale up to directly compete with an incumbent.  LinkedIn is here to stay as the best and only social media service aimed at the business community and without any competition their innovation appears to focus on tools and services that they can monetize rather than improving the basic functionality and usability of the platform.

Aside from Facebook, I have created accounts on most social media platforms (excluding Snap or Tik Tok where I consider myself too old), but then haven’t used them much initially.  At a given point, usually when my network has expanded and it fits with my interests, I begin to use the services more heavily and they become addictive.  This happened with Instagram and has recently happened with LinkedIn.  Despite annoying features and poor design, I am now a habitual user.  This is one more explanation for why LinkedIn appears less incentivized to improve their product aside from areas they can directly monetize; it is good enough to maintain user activity.

Returning to my first question: what is LinkedIn?  It started as a networking tool where you could connect with co-workers, industry contacts and family.  Just as Facebook originally required a college email address to login, the early version of LinkedIn worked better with your business email address as it would automatically place you in a group with your current employer and colleagues.  The first real beneficiaries of LinkedIn were recruitment consultants.  Overnight they no longer had to solicit org charts from clients as all the data they needed was accurate and available in LinkedIn.  Pulling together a list of potential candidates for open roles was much easier and they could be far more targeted in their business development.  This was a short-term boost as LinkedIn also enabled employers to cut out the recruitment consultants (and their 20%+ fees), build in-house recruitment teams and advertise roles directly.  The final victor and chief beneficiary was LinkedIn, and their owners Microsoft, when they began to monetize the product.  Information and services were restricted to encourage both the employer and candidate to subscribe.  Whereas employers saved, particularly if they were large and frequent hirers, candidates were stuck with a new bill and now needed to advocate for themselves online.

LinkedIn continues to reap the benefits.  Companies, employees, freelancers, small businesses, candidates and hobbyists all contribute vast quantities of valuable data to LinkedIn.  Unlike all other successful social-media platforms, LinkedIn charge for subscriptions to access all but the most basic services and they sell corporate licenses to access specific tools that integrate LinkedIn with other business systems.  As with other platforms they sell advertising directed at a very valuable user base and they charge users to promote content to reach a wider audience.

Content is now provided regularly by organizations and individuals as a primary tool for business comms; supplementing and often replacing the use of industry publications.  Historically posts were primarily submitted by people trying to boost their profile to affect a career change.  The content would often discuss industry issues but avoid making conclusions or courting controversy.  The quality was mixed, and the burst of activity would fizzle out when the career-change objective was met.  Today, aside from the posts that start with the awful and pervasive house style: “I was honored to attend/present/talk with…” there are content creators who use LinkedIn as the shopfront for their business and provide genuinely interesting commentary on business-related news and affairs.

To return to the question of what LinkedIn is.  The original networking tool is now a social media platform where users maintain a profile and interact with other users and entities primarily within the space of doing business.  That business is predominantly recruitment, sales, marketing and communications, but also includes news, opinion and thought-leadership.

To answer the second question of who LinkedIn is for, it is targeted at content providers, comms teams, inhouse recruiters, sales and business development staff, freelancers and contractors, job seekers and anyone who chooses to source their business or industry news and information from the platform. 

Let’s move on to how it performs.  In a word LinkedIn’s interface is poor.  The home page looks like Facebook from 10 years ago with a newsfeed in the middle and stuff you are never likely click on to the left and the right.  The left includes your profile picture and below that “recent” and “groups”.  Only one of the groups was genuinely a “recent” visit.  I had joined the “Brain Expansion Group” as an experiment to see if that helped impressions for my blog if I shared the post in the group (spoiler: it didn’t).  The rest were not at all recent and some groups I didn’t recognize at all.  On the right is “LinkedIn News” which is a small panel that can be expanded, there is no imagery to support the articles and it gives no idea of the source.  In the interests of research, I clicked on an article, and it was very short and written by a named editor at LinkedIn news.  Given the ubiquitous push for AI across LinkedIn, I suspect very soon that this news will be machine-written if it isn’t already.  Beneath the news article are related posts contributed by users.  To be fair this is quite interesting, it works similarly to a news search on X and the quality and accuracy is dependent upon the algorithm.

The other tabs are “my network”, “jobs”, “messaging”, “notifications” and “me”.  I won’t go into all these in detail, but I will pull out the main features and some of the issues.  My network is a list of invites and beneath that a scrolling page of suggestions.  In prime real-estate you are invited to subscribe or resubscribe to premium to grow your network more quickly.  On the left there are your connections and contacts.  What is the difference between these two?  It’s not obvious, but connections are people I have agreed to connect with through the app and contacts appears to be some sort of ancient upload of my online address book, anyone who has ever emailed me and some random email addresses I don’t recognize at all.  There is a clear disconnect between what should be a useful curated network of contacts and the large bucket of existing and potential connections that LinkedIn presents.  As a colleague mentioned earlier this week, why isn’t there a notes field associated with each contact where you can write down where you met them and any other relevant information that would assist with a sales pitch?  For what should be the beating heart of a platform that was designed for building networks and reaching new clients, the my network tab is a significant weakness.

I haven’t used the jobs tab but given the popularity of LinkedIn for posting and applying for new roles, I am going to assume it is good and maybe even best in class. 

Messaging is another poorly designed screen with a list of messages that are grouped by different pre-designed filters.  Filters are useful if you are using LinkedIn as one of your main mailing tools, but in this case, I would expect to be able to file messages in folders or customize my own filters.  The messages pop-up tool appears on every screen including the messages tab which is an annoying duplication.  The messages pop-up tool has a bit of a life of its own and keeps opening one specific message that covers a large area of my screen.  If I could get rid of the messages pop-up tool completely I would. 

The notifications tab does what it is meant to do and is also very useful due to another design flaw.  When you post a comment or some content it is very difficult to find it again.  It is possible by clicking on Me tab, which then needs a second click on “view profile”.  Halfway down your profile you hit the “my activity” section which gives you the last three actions (grouped as posts, comments and images).  At the bottom of this section is “show all” where finally after 3 or 4 clicks and a bit of scrolling you can see your posts.  The notifications tab can be used as a shortcut.  If someone has reacted to or commented on your post it will show up in your notification feed and you can access it directly from there.

To sum up, the interface is, in my opinion, weak and poorly designed.  It feels as if new functionality has been constantly layered on and it would benefit from a large refresh.  How likely is a refresh? As mentioned at the beginning there is no competition at all in this space, so it feels unlikely.

Let’s move onto my least favorite feature and that is pricing.  A Premium subscription in the US starts at $39.99 a month.  For that money you can buy ad-supported subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Paramount+, Max and Peacock and still have over a dollar of change.  What do get for that price?  You can see who has looked at your profile, 5 InMails a month, an open profile, some insights and Linkedin Learning.  The pricing tiers increase from there.  For that you get more InMails and it come with a vague promise that subscribers’ profiles are seen on average 4x more than non-subscribers.

Everyone’s experience will vary and if you are looking to change jobs a subscription may be a necessary cost.  Personally, I don’t find the offer compelling, and the price is too high.  Our profiles should be open by choice, and I fondly remember when I could see who looked at my profile without needing to pay a subscription.  InMails are unsolicited spam and are necessary because LinkedIn limits the number of connections you have and your ability to request to connect with people too far outside your online network.  Most other social media platforms allow the user to confirm if they want to connect with someone who appears to be a stranger.  LinkedIn has taken part ownership of this decision themselves, but then allowed paying users to spam other unconnected members as a workaround.  Linkedin learning was originally Lynda.com before LinkedIn purchased it in 2015.  It’s not bad and used to have a standalone monthly subscription of $25 before it was fully merged in 2021.  This would go some way to justify the $39.99 total subscription cost.  LinkedIn should offer a cheaper option without the learning module as I assume most users don’t want it or would prefer the option to pay for a competitor product.   Some companies pay for a corporate subscription and offer LinkedIn Learning to staff for free.  In this scenario a personal subscription includes a significant double charge.  The expanded insights may be worth something and could be the best reason for subscribing if you find them useful, but are they worth $39.99 a month?

Some other features worth exploring quickly.  LinkedIn used to encourage people to award contacts in their network with endorsements for being good at particular skills.  This functionality still exists, but thankfully has fallen out of use given that it lacks any rigor.  I have been endorsed for 23 skills.  My highest rated skill with 19 endorsements is for Financial Modeling and those endorsements include a selection of ex-colleagues, suppliers, friends and complete strangers.  I appreciate their consideration and kindness, but it isn’t reliable evidence of my abilities.

Slightly more useful are recommendations that you can write for other colleagues or service providers.  I wouldn’t place any reliance on them when interviewing candidates for a role as proper references are more informative and can be checked, but I understand their appeal in a belts and braces approach to securing new employment.  Recommendations used as testimonials for a particular service, can work well and probably rival Google or Yelp if you secure significant new business through LinkedIn.

The latest functionality that I see appearing frequently in my notifications are requests to contribute answers to some work-related questions posed by LinkedIn.  If you submit more than a few answers in a given subject area you will get a LinkedIn badge on your profile to mark you as an expert in that field.  As an aside, the interface is so bad that I have spent 5 minutes trying to find an example and failed (it’s possible that this is only available to active subscribers).  The questions are typically generic and the chances of someone reading through hundreds of answers to form an opinion are unrealistic.  This means that the only engagement a standard user would have with this service is when they are notified that a contact has submitted an answer.  If your interest is piqued, you follow the link to read their answer and may be one or two other answers either side and then go on with your life.  Based on this, the motivation for taking time to contribute answers really comes down to the same motivation for swapping endorsements and recommendations; you want validation of your skills on your LinkedIn profile.  I’m not going to criticize anyone for following this path but would repeat my caution that it probably won’t significantly improve chances of securing new work.

One final upgrade is the ubiquitous Microsoft backed AI assistance.  The most obvious place this appears is the offer of help to craft new posts or reply to others’ posts.  For the benefit of this blog, I clicked on this option to see what it did.  It was only at that point I was informed that I would need to upgrade to premium to make use of this service.  I have unexpectedly uncovered one more tool to support the $39.99 subscription cost.  As someone who writes my own posts, I find it depressing that Gen AI is contributing more to discussions.  My brain is still trying to grapple with what would happen if we could set our profiles to auto-pilot, initiate a discussion with the help of AI and then open up the comments to inputs from other contacts’ AI.  Would major new strategies emerge with opportunities for business growth, would the system willfully steal from other people’s content without attribution, or would it descend into banal generalities?  Or perhaps the AI would also get fed up with the LinkedIn user-interface and overhaul it or set up a rival competitor product that they may or may not allow non-AI users to join.

As ugly and dysfunctional as LinkedIn’s platform is, it ultimately does serve a purpose and does make business easier in many respects.  Knowing who you are communicating with, their background and any overlaps in network that can help strengthen a professional relationship is valuable.  As the pre-eminent recruitment and hiring database it has the potential to match candidates with open roles on an unprecedented scale, whilst expanding the diversity of potential applicants.  There are now fantastic content creators whose work wouldn’t be surfaced on other social media ecosystems.  Finally, there is no other platform where you can get that uplifting pat on the back for a promotion or change in career.  Yet, unless LinkedIn is a tool you absolutely need to do business, it is difficult to justify $39.99 per month subscription.  I continue to access the limited free features safe in the knowledge that fighting against the user interface only costs me time. 

Next week I will offer unsolicited but well-meaning advice for new managers. As always, if you have comments on this week’s post or want to throw in some suggestions for next week’s installment, they are all gratefully received.  The last two posts have also been a bit longer than usual.  If you have strong feelings on this I would also love to know.