Lately, LinkedIn has become cringe... or cool, or more important than ever, depending on who you ask. So, is LinkedIn working well for us, or has it devolved into yet another shouty social media site?
Lately, LinkedIn has become cringe... or cool, or more important than ever, depending on who you ask. So, is LinkedIn working well for us, or has it devolved into yet another shouty social media site?
Tim Kiladze is a Globe and Mail business reporter, Bay Street veteran and LinkedIn connoisseur. He wrote a compelling report on the evolution of LinkedIn: The tone has shifted to more performative “thought leadership,” the line between personal and professional has blurred – and now Bay Street executives are peacocking their post stats over lunch. But if you stay away from LinkedIn, are you sabotaging your career?
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Vass Bednar I am Vass Bednar and I host this Globe and Mail podcast lately.
Katrina Onstad And I'm Katrina Onstad. I'm the show's executive producer. So Vass. Yes. Did you see that recent LinkedIn post from the disgraced ex executive Ryan Salame? I'm sure he's in your network of Crypto Bros.
Vass Bednar Yes, of course we're connected. I did see that post, though it was widely shared on and off the platform and I guess he appeared in a lot of LinkedIn searches that week.
Katrina Onstad Yeah, it was pretty good. Okay, so listener, if you have not seen this, here's what we're talking about. So after being sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for his involvement in Sam Bankman-fried multibillion dollar cryptocurrency scheme, Salame put up a LinkedIn post that read, I'm happy to share that I'm starting a new position as an inmate at FCI Cumberland with little cartoon dancing, people jumping around a cupcake.
Vass Bednar It's kind of amazing to have a sense of humor about going to jail. We'd been talking about LinkedIn and how much it's changed, how it slowly shifted to kind of the center of the social media experience becoming much more Twitter fied and moving away from encouraging happy talk and support more towards kind of aggressive and provocative thought leadership.
Katrina Onstad Yeah, performative. And I know that it's becoming more successful because the more successful the social media platform becomes, the more I start feeling sick and anxious every time I have to engage with it, I'm like a weathervane. So for years, LinkedIn was such an inert place, like it knew what it was. It was just a resume repository with the occasional cheesy I got promoted post, but now it's just exhausting and has all this hustle of Instagram. It gives me an ulcer. And comedians are also picking up on this new tension and com edy that exists and lurks on LinkedIn.
Skit I'm excited to announce I've finished my beer. Congratulations. Thumbs up, Keep up the good work. I'm embarking on a new chapter and we'll be following the boys around the field. I endorse this. Fantastic. Looking forward to partner with the boys again for another test that significantly leans. So things are coming. Beers and grab another beer and started to connect.
Katrina Onstad Congrats on the beer. Anniversary is pretty good too.
Vass Bednar Fantastic news.
Katrina Onstad Fantastic news.
Vass Bednar That's a tiktok of four comedians. The troupe kick it forward with their skit. Do you hate LinkedIn? I mean, LinkedIn's also a place where Katrina you can share what your ulcer taught you about B2B sales.
Katrina Onstad Thank you. I will post that.
Vass Bednar It has really changed. And our guest today has been tracking the platform's evolution from quiet, reserved outsider to Microsoft juggernaut into something much sloppier, sillier and even scarier global male business reporter Tim Kiladze recently wrote this feature called Bay Street has a secret addiction to LinkedIn and it's getting toxic. But it's not just Bay Street getting more performative, though. Teenagers, recent grads, service workers and retirees are all joining the fray as we ask each other whether LinkedIn is quote unquote cool now, which is what Bloomberg said, or a mess, which is what The Guardian said, or maybe a little bit of both.
Katrina Onstad Yeah, well, I guess that depends how you feel about more sharing, more personal, more political post, that blur of work and lifelines. You feel that there more than ever. And this model annoying to me and some does seem to be working. LinkedIn now has more than 1 billion members and has made 16 billion in revenue over the last 12 months.
Vass Bednar Hashtag leadership. Hashtag innovation. Hashtag Entrepreneurship. Hashtag Motivation.
Katrina Onstad Hashtag cupcake. Cupcake, cupcake.
Vass Bednar Yes. And Tim, who used to work in finance on Bay Street or as he called it, the street has an insider's eye on this evolution. And I had many questions for him, including this one. Do I actually need to be on LinkedIn at all? Side note, I'm on it right now. I hope you're open to the work of listening to this conversation. Welcome to Lately. Tim, welcome.
Tim Kiladze Happy to be here.
Vass Bednar So do you agonize over your LinkedIn picture?
Tim Kiladze I don't. Only because it's my same globe headshot.
Vass Bednar So how old is it?
Tim Kiladze It's actually what's really funny. We went to this recently. It's it's it's about nine years old now. And they've recently just did new headshots.
Vass Bednar And you resisted.
Tim Kiladze Yeah. But I actually emailed a number of friends and was like, Do I still look like this?
Vass Bednar I think you do.
Tim Kiladze Good.
Vass Bednar Yes, this is audio, but you look remarkably like the avatar. Okay.
Tim Kiladze We're good.
Vass Bednar Congratulations. You're a business journalist. Presumably you post articles on LinkedIn, maybe find sources for stories there. What was the change you saw happening on LinkedIn that made you want to write this piece?
Tim Kiladze So I actually used to work in banking. I worked on Bay Street, so I was like the early beta testing round of LinkedIn kind of thing. And having gone to business school to like a lot of people, just you would graduate and you would create a LinkedIn profile. It's kind of like this really many online resume. And for the longest time, it was just, as I want to say, dead site, but nothing happened. Somebody you went to school with might send you, like, a connection request, and you'd click it and accept, and then nothing would happen. Yeah. Around 2014 or so is when you started to see a bit of a change. And what they did is they tried to kind of branch more into what I would broadly call thought leadership. Okay. And so they tried to recruit CEOs and people like that to kind of weigh in on stuff. Maybe they went to some big conference and then they would give notes on the conference afterwards or, you know, kind of like relay their thoughts, that kind of stuff. But it was pretty like benign is how I would describe it. And then it kind of stayed that way for a while. And the real kind of like jumped the shark moment is during the pandemic. And you had all these white collar workers working from home and they were just lonely. Like, we look back now and it's very clear that we all kind of lost our minds a little bit during the pandemic for various reasons. And people were posting, I think the one that I always like, my mind was like some employee who worked for like an official company or whatever posted like a monthly certificate they got for like employee of the month kind of thing. Yeah. And I'm just like, Why are we doing this? Like, what's going on here? And everyone, you know, if you member that era was so like humbled and thrilled and you know, so was a little bit more like makes you want to gag. But it wasn't like nefarious. That has now switched. And I would argue in the last 12 to 18 months, there's been like this a revolution that's happened at LinkedIn and a lot of people have been sucked in and they aren't aware of it.
Vass Bednar So let's back up for a second. LinkedIn was kind of an early generation Silicon Valley startup. Right. It launched in 2003. It actually predates Twitter and Facebook. What was the original promise of LinkedIn at the time it started?
Tim Kiladze The founder, Reid Hoffman, has talked about. The idea was like, there's actually money to be made in people like identifying themselves. And then you can sell that to the corporate side of things. But for the longest time, it was really kind of struggling. It went public in 2011, and the stock had done well for a while because there was this rage around Facebook and Twitter, etc. But by 2016, it basically started to really kind of collapse on itself. And Reid Hoffman started talking about it in these ways that were. I guess kind of not that bad given how practitioners talk about things now. But at the time it sounded a bit ludicrous. There was a line he had given to The New Yorker about how he wanted everybody in the world, every working person in the world, to have a LinkedIn account, even like blue collar workers. And it would be this database of everybody. And you kind of sit back and say, well, like, why? You know? But again, what you're told about like scale and grow and we're going to be this thing for the world. And then in early 2016, put out its bad earnings and its stock drops 40% in a day. And it was like, something's wrong here. And then Microsoft superseded. They had missed out on the social networking boom, and so they saw a way to get in and that was through LinkedIn.
Vass Bednar So when Microsoft bought LinkedIn, they paid $26 billion in 2016, as you said. How does the platform make money? Like, do you think that was a good investment?
Tim Kiladze So they have about 16 billion in annual revenue, Just less than half of that 7 billion comes from the recruiting side of things. So recruiters paying to get access to information on potential job applicants effectively. But then arguably just as important, brings in about 5 billion is effectively like B2B marketing. So the line they give is like, listen, every CFO of a pharmaceutical company is going to be on LinkedIn. This is from the U.S. side of things. If you want to target pharmaceutical CFOs because you have a new product, you want to sell them or something. This is the place to do that. So it's kind of like targeted advertising. But to have those people check LinkedIn and kind of constantly see those ads, you need to have something there. And that there is, whether you want to call it the news feed or a feed of just of some sort. And they've really populated that with. Human voices. And those human voices are business professionals who now comment on it the way that you would comment on like Facebook.
Vass Bednar And it's a big feed. I access it on the desktop. I feel like I'm one of few people that still do that, like I don't have the app. Are you a power desktop user?
Tim Kiladze I'm a power desktop user and then I recently got the app. Yeah, because I was trying to do more research for this research services.
Vass Bednar Yes.
Tim Kiladze And it was actually crazy how much more addictive the app is.
Vass Bednar Wow.
Tim Kiladze It was a really telling moment for me, like, there's like I get even more now and yeah, the desktop just you feel a little bit more in control in app, it's just everything's thrown at you.
Vass Bednar It doesn't update as quickly, it's just a bigger feed. Maybe that's why.
Tim Kiladze And there's just more going on like a small screen. It feels more like Barky. It's how I would describe it.
Vass Bednar Carnival Barker So then what about for users? Like do people actually get jobs?
Tim Kiladze Well, one thing I will say, broadly speaking, is that talking to friends who don't really work in the business type space, you know, business is a broad bucket because that includes things like tech and banking and kind of any kind of white collar work. Now, they're really surprised often that LinkedIn has become a thing like LinkedIn, like seriously, it used to be this kind of like joke thing that people talked about, and I'm like, No, no, no, no. It gets real. And then I actually went and pulled some of the stats from Pew, which is audience research in the U.S. and LinkedIn is used by more people than Twitter than Reddit. But if you want to reach rich people, I'm telling you, LinkedIn is where it's at. The highest proportion of its users make $100,000 or more a year. If you want to access CFOs or whomever, decision makers, this is where it is.
Vass Bednar So you called it a revolution. What kind of clout does LinkedIn have now? Post-Pandemic? What are you observing in your own circle.
Tim Kiladze Over the past year or so? I've heard more executives talk about it, and there's one that really stood out in my mind. I went for lunch with somebody and they mentioned like, I was at this panel yesterday and I posted on LinkedIn and like, it did really well. I was just like, Are you there now? Like, what is this? And to me, it's really fascinating because it used to be that, like, executives had clout because they had the money and they were in a high powered job. So like, there was a respect that came from that. And now that's not enough anymore. They want to have like influence in the social sphere, which I think on some level is what everybody wants. But there's clearly some sort of crossover that's happened with like the influencer trend in general data. Yeah. And it kind of reminds me of like in Toronto, you go to like a Toronto Blue Jays game and you're on the Jumbotron. They go, my God, I was seeing, you know, I mean, it's but it's totally playing into that type of thing. And it's just weird, though, that, like, the average person is excited that they're on the Jumbotron. But now you have the executives that are happy that they're on LinkedIn and getting that kind of social praise.
Vass Bednar And then now that's what we're we're trying to do. We're all jockeying for the Jumbotron. Is there or was there for you like a tipping point, a moment that we can identify where LinkedIn kind of changed?
Tim Kiladze There was actually a period where LinkedIn was actually quite useful and it still listen, I want to be very clear. It still is useful for a lot of purposes, but it was this era where there was kind of like humble bragging posts ended and you could share stuff and you would see like real engagement. And at the same time, Twitter was descending until what I would call a hellhole, you know, where it's just people yelling and shouting. Selecting was kind of just like CCP. So like, okay, this is good. I would argue that that safe space started to end around October 7th last year, and it's obviously a very controversial topic and anybody affected by it, understandably so, has a reason to kind of like say, you know what, I'm going to cross the corporate line here and just like speak from my heart on either side. So I get it. But if that classic thing of like, once the dam breaks, it just led to more and more and more. And then I noticed you start to see a lot more like anti Trudeau posts. So it just became like more negative and more angry all the time. And it's never really recovered from that. And politics in this day and age and on social media incites rage and anger and it makes people just more carnival barkers. But I think what people need to remember is that LinkedIn is also in a way encouraging this, like even if they're not explicitly saying it. What we've learned from social media is that the algorithm matters and what's being shown to you is decided by something that they've sent. Like I actually heard from a lot of executives that LinkedIn's kind of like a nightmare for them. They'd be like, You would not believe how many messages we get from either. It's from the recruiter side of things that people looking for jobs. Like the filtering is really bad. But I think at least in what I can tell about kind of the way LinkedIn wants it, it's like you're getting this like smorgasbord of stuff that just like so that every time you log in or click the app, there's a new notification, right?
Vass Bednar Or maybe an illusion of being really close or having people be more accessible than they actually are.
Tim Kiladze Yeah, that's a good point.
Vass Bednar I'm also seeing more like super personal posts on LinkedIn, again, blurring that line between professional zones. Maybe I've seen people posting about their kids even a birth announcement and kind of been hearing about this idea that it's now okay to, you know, bring your whole self to work. What is this shift in tone, at least in our LinkedIn feeds, say, about our relationship to work?
Tim Kiladze I'm really torn on what it all means because I don't think people have figured that out yet. I just think people are doing because other people are doing it. But what really irks me personally is when people try to teach like a lesson out of it because it just feels so corny.
Vass Bednar yeah, that's the total cringe meme format.
Tim Kiladze Yeah. So I think at the end of the day, what a lot of it boils down to is tone. And what I found quite interesting is like talking to people for this LinkedIn piece that I wrote asking like, you know, why were you so angry or so outspoken? You'd be surprised, like a lot of people were like, Well, I didn't mean it in that way. And I'd have to say, well, like that's how it comes across. And so I wonder if there's, I guess, like a generational thing. A lot of them tend to be older and they never really like grew up with like Facebook the way that I did. So they don't understand, like even small things like about like where you use periods or if you use a period signals a lot, you know, you being a little more curt and sharp, you know.
Vass Bednar Another shift is that LinkedIn users can now post tech talk, ask short videos. I'm going to ask you what's a linked influencer? This is hilarious.
Tim Kiladze I don't think they know what it is just yet because they only just launched this in the past few months. I've seen videos of like how to save $10,000 on your car. I think what is happening and they have talked about this a bit at an Investor Day is TikTok has branched a bit more into like personal finance advice. And so I think LinkedIn is worried that its moat, which is like business, could be stolen. So instead of waiting for that to happen, they're going to the other side and bringing that in.
Vass Bednar But it's LinkedIn trying to be cool. Like is this part of why The Independent called LinkedIn the most cringe platform out there? The video element.
Tim Kiladze I don't think they're trying to be cool. I think they're trying to chase attention. Like most social media networks.
Vass Bednar Okay.
Tim Kiladze And I think that that at large has become one of the big problems because. All they care about is keeping you addicted. I get a lot of benefit of social media, but this addiction matters. And what happened on these platforms matters now, because those things are blurring into so-called real life. It used to be there was this saying, you know, Twitter isn't real life and we always say this. That has changed. And, you know, the biggest example to me is in the presidential debate in the U.S. you have Donald Trump citing this lie that immigrants, the U.S. and Ohio are eating cats and dogs. It is like the clearest moment that people are believing these things and spreading it up to that level. And that's what I worry about, the addictive nature to it, because nobody can kind of understand what's real or not or there's a whole nother element to me. And maybe this is me being a dumb male, but there's a lot of jealousy baked into the platforms now.
Vass Bednar So I saw a study, it was published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology that showed that I might be able to pick up on narcissistic traits just from what someone posts on their LinkedIn page. What do you think the connection could be between narcissism and LinkedIn? Like, do you have to be a narcissist to be good at the platform, or does it just sort of amplify those traits in someone?
Tim Kiladze I do think there's a level of narcissism to it, but I would argue that narcissism is about social media in general. This idea that, like, my thoughts deserve to be heard. You know, at the end of the day, it's always about like, look how great this thing I did was. The same time. I would also say that, like, you could probably correlate narcissism and like being an executive because it's like, why do people want to rise the corporate ladder? Because they want money, power, influence. How do you do that? So there's these things kind of intertwined. Yeah.
Vass Bednar So do you think people are posting differently now on LinkedIn because Twitter and Facebook have become just worse places to exist? Or is there something that is totally different on a cultural level?
Tim Kiladze What I think is the case is that because LinkedIn kind of presented itself as this like pure place that wasn't going to be Twitter and you have to use your real name and there's no anonymity. It was seen as like a safer premium place in a way. And it's almost like that is being exploited now. It's like, we're going to take the goodness of it and actually make money off that. And I mean, to some of the creators of influencers who, you know, at the same time, I do think that there's a corporate agenda. The longest time Microsoft bought LinkedIn but kept it kind of separate. It was its own little entity within Microsoft. Now there's much more blurring of those lines, and they're integrating more and more A.I. into LinkedIn. And like at this Investor Day in June, it was very much about like, we're going to use Microsoft's A.I. And remember, Microsoft has invested in open A.I., so there's like a huge connection there, and we're going to tie that into LinkedIn. And so I think there was much more of like using LinkedIn as this test case of like how I can be used in the workplace or used in a enterprise setting.
Vass Bednar Yeah, I do want to talk about the content itself. I'm guessing that a lot of executives don't write their own posts or not entirely write. Maybe they have an assistant or ghostwriter, a professional write their comms department working on it. Now, LinkedIn has added this write with AI feature. We all know that the people whose names are attached to posts aren't necessarily the people actually writing the posts a lot of the time. So what are we even playing out here? Like, why bother?
Tim Kiladze This is so sad because I think part of is that people don't care. Like people want to see the pictures of the executives on the panel or whatever.
Vass Bednar But do they.
Tim Kiladze I think so. Look, I think at the end of the day. People just want to be seen in whatever capacity possible. And when you see some executive posts from the corporate town hall and it's like you can see they have like 700 lakes. It ties into this idea of like, why do people want to rise the corporate ladder from money and power and influence and. It's like I want to get to a point where like, I have 700 people like my post. If that makes sense. That's what I think it is. But what I also want to point out that I found really interesting is that Mark Zuckerberg, he's been on this media tour recently, and one of the talk he gave was about like where social media is going, but in a very smart way. He was like, well, there's been three areas of social media. We're just about to enter a third era. The first era was about personalization and like, you know, us on social media. The second era was about content creation and influencers. And the third area is the air era. And he said most content in the future is going to be all air generated. And you can already see this on Facebook like I rarely log in anymore. But it's all these random air generated pictures and things of that sort. And people like, don't really care. We'll just stay on it. And on things like LinkedIn and not really care about the depth of the posts as long as there's just a new post.
Vass Bednar Well, some of the new posts I do see a lot more kind of genuine vulnerability on LinkedIn than I used to, especially in the current job market where there are people openly posting about how they're looking for work after being laid off. How do we square or make sense of that contradiction? Is this kind of a genuine openness and honesty in a place that often feels quite fake?
Tim Kiladze I think that a lot of it is honest because not that long ago, like it was embarrassing to write like I got laid off and I'm looking for work. So I think that is one of these positive moments, particularly after the tech crash in 2022, a lot of people got laid off because it was happening to so many people. It was like, Well, we're just going to own this and put it out there. The problem now, though, is that like like any trend, it kind of gets adopted by the wrong people and then gets commodified. But I think what it boils down to is that everything's being turned into narrative because at the end of the day, the human brain loves narrative. It's why we love stories. And I, you know, if you give it the right prompts, will construct a narrative for you. And I think after a while, you're like, okay, I don't need your full narrative again. I'm seeing somebody content that like, I don't even know who they are. So I think that's part of the problem. It's just that you're being fed too much of it versus like things you would care about.
Vass Bednar So do you think Microsoft's trying to build this out as a social media platform? Or is their end game more oriented around fodder to train algorithms?
Tim Kiladze Maybe it's both. I mean, I do think that they really want to tie in to the social networking thing because you see one, you just see the user ship. It's like almost as big as Tik tok. But two, there was a news story that went around a few weeks ago about how they've set new settings where it's like automatically I think the default is that your content is being used to train their A.I., but for sure, like 100 is the same way that Twitter is probably going to be used for Ellen's algorithm because, you know, A.I. models are only as good as the inputs into their databases. And something like LinkedIn or Twitter has live ongoing stuff that can feed potentially into a database and therefore keep their language models current. So I definitely think there's a play there.
Vass Bednar You've been mentioning sort of coming of age on the Internet and how you've seen the platform evolve. And for me, the fact that people can pay for premium memberships or different tiers of memberships does remind me of the early days of OkCupid. Right. There's this element of pseudo surveillance on LinkedIn. You can pay more to see who's viewed your profile or you can pay for anonymous browsing. I'm always nervous when I creep someone because I'm like, They're going to know I went to file. What are they going to think? Why do we care about who's checking us out?
Tim Kiladze Because I think at the end of the day, we all just want to be cool. And whether that goes back to like some high school, you know, mental mind tricks that people played on us, that's kind of just like a human nature thing, right? They think about how much of pop culture is derived from like being in the zeitgeisty and being noticed. I just think people like the attention. You know, it's like it's why. People love a little bit of a flirt, you know what I mean? It's just like, you know, it's good to feel like you're desired or something, right?
Vass Bednar So we've been talking about how linked in is changing, but is LinkedIn changing us and the way we work?
Tim Kiladze I do think that there is an element where some faction of the population believes that if it wasn't on LinkedIn, it didn't happen, which very much reminds me of Instagram. And like younger people feeling like I have to post proof that I was at the party. And I have had friends who work on the streets say to me that they've been encouraged, straight up, told to post when there's maybe like a deal that their company has done. We want to kind of like promote it. So it is tying into this idea of like we need to marker to selves. How will anybody know we were involved if we didn't write about it, you know? So everyone's kind of a quasi market now.
Vass Bednar How can you be a successful professional and not be on LinkedIn anymore?
Tim Kiladze Yes, which is a very important thing. There are still a lot of people that are like, I find it crazy or whatever. So there is still so much that happens outside of LinkedIn in the same way that even when like Twitter was at its peak, you know. There are scores of decisions that are being made daily that are done in rooms that are not on social media. They're being done in real life.
Vass Bednar I've heard of that place. Tim, I'm so glad we've been connected. I'd like to add you to my network.
Tim Kiladze You've been accepted.
Vass Bednar You've been listening to lately, a Globe and Mail podcast. Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Jay Cockburn, and our sound designer is Cameron McIvor, and I'm your host partner in our Shownotes. You can subscribe to the Lately newsletter where the Globe's online culture reporter Samantha Edwards unpacks more of the latest in business and technology. A new episode of Lately comes out every Friday wherever you get your podcasts.