LinkedIn: 2023's Hottest Dating App
On choosing the best match but within the working world
*Disclaimer* everything I say in this post should be taken with teeniest tiniest atomic-scale grain of salt as I am violently high but with a creative burst of energy.
These days, the first social media app I check when I wake up is not Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, or Facebook, it’s worse. LinkedIn. This is what happens when you’re diagnosed with the illness of “being 22, a ‘so-called’ entry-level worker, and unemployed”, thankfully, the illness is not terminal (yet).
When I open the ugliest app on the face of the planet, I am immediately bombarded with a timeline compiled of posts such as 30-somethings making it up the corporate latter, that one guy I had a one night stand with freshman year of college being hired by Goldman Sachs, and the mass amounts of #opentowork posts after intense layoffs from companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Twitter.
After I inevitably finish my mindless scroll of the morning, I head over to their job posting tab, which I honestly find quite useful as you can set alerts for specific job titles, locations, and experience levels (but it comes with a catch, which I will soon discuss). After I have flipped through a few pages, I land on a job posting that matches what I am looking for, say it is a sustainable housing associate or whatnot, an ounce of excitement temporarily comes from the mere hope that *maybe* I found the job I have been looking for. Sometimes, however, when I click on postings I fancy, I find that it was listed three months ago, or that five-hundred people have already applied (I’ve seen listings with upwards of three-thousand job applications before). The dread kicks in and I start to wonder if I should even apply given I have a one in five hundred chance of landing a simple interview or if the listing is still active and the hiring manager forgot to take it down.
Due to my recent experiences of getting rejected from over 100 jobs, even when I am using techniques such as Jobscanner.com to scan my resume and cover letters and finding hiring manager’s emails and reaching out letting them know of my interest and my application, there is no hope when you know there is going to be someone out there who is more qualified than you. The existential dread is even worse when not a single hiring manager has responded to my emails, so whoever told me about this technique is a pathological liar! All of this commotion has got me wondering if LinkedIn as well as dating apps are one in the same.
If you get your thinking gears turning for just a second, you will be able to find the common denominator between the two: both are continually searching for the perfect candidate among a vast landscape of potentiality. LinkedIn has amassed more job seekers than ever, whereas Hinge and Tinder have done the same but for romance seekers.
Does this comparison imply that the two have similar outcomes as well? If this is the case, I will never find a job via LinkedIn as I have never been on a single Hinge or Tinder date due to the endless scrolling in the hopes I will land on the “one”.
We live in an age where we are taught that something bigger and better is on the horizon and that we should grasp onto the anticipation that one day we will attain the dream career or the partner that completes you. Grasping onto said anticipation implies that we must keep scrolling, stalking, hunting for what it is we desire. However, the scrolling may as well be infinite. I want to talk to the person who landed the job that three-thousand people applied for. Are they even real? Are the job posters who I contact after I submit my application real or AI generated? Why does it feel like although all of my friends and family members keep telling me, “You will eventually land the job you had been hoping for and things will just fall into place!”, it appears to be a facade that will never actually come to fruition?
I went to school for four years, I ACTUALLY studied, I obtained 3 internships, I was the co-founder and president of an environmental organization on my campus, I graduated magna cum laude, and right now my efforts have amounted to unemployment and marijuana dependency. You might call my dramatic, but I am calling bullshit on LinkedIn for making this process much harder than it should be, even though the app’s initial purpose was to connect job posters with job seekers. I understand that most will struggle to find a job even with a degree, and that it has been this way for a while now, but why does that mean I then must resort for some service-level job, as if that is the only attainable mode of work in a hyper-capitalist society??
More importantly, why do I tie my inner value so heavily to the job I work for? Why was I so heavily disillusioned with the idea that studying environmental science meant I would single-handedly solve climate change? In reality, a B.S. in environmental science is vague, and I didn’t go to Harvard, so I must be worthless in the eyes of hiring managers looming on LinkedIn. Yet, by communicating my frustrations on my silly little Substack, hopefully I can learn to understand that we are not supposed to live to work, and I still have value, regardless of what the job market tells me.
Ok, my unfinished crochet sweater is calling me, I must attend to her needs before I spew out anymore word salad for the night. Goodnight and F U LinkedIn.