Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI
As the pressure to post on LinkedIn grows, more workers are flinging themselves into the breaches of Professional Posting, without the training on how to post. Some are using AI to guide them through writer's block, and some are getting flagged for sounding like AI slop. In an employers' market, where people step on the job hunt treadmill and find it much harder to get off, LinkedIn can no longer serve only as an online résumé page and Easy Apply job portal. It's a networking necessity — not just for people when they're on the hunt for jobs, but for any who could face layoffs and land back in the applicant pool.
It can also land you in hot water quickly.
Patrick works in sales, but dabbles in real estate as a side hustle, and like any good hustler, he advertised his realtor qualifications and a newsletter he started on LinkedIn. This summer, Patrick, whose full name I'm omitting to protect his job, tells me a manager requested he brand his LinkedIn page more toward his company work at his 9 to 5. He says this pressure came as he learned through the company grapevine that the CEO raised concerns that he may be splitting his work time. He wasn't keeping his second gig a secret, but the interaction "did make me think a lot more about how I choose to present that to my company," he says, and he's less likely to post about outside work on LinkedIn now.
"You putting your head down and building a network at a company, and then hoping that same network would help you get your next job, is super short-sighted," says J.T. O'Donnell, founder of career coaching platform Work It Daily. Job security and tenure have dropped. O'Donnell says recruiters have moved from "loud" hiring, when they would post and share roles on platforms like LinkedIn and let the applicants roll in, to "quiet" hiring, where they may never advertise a job but will scour LinkedIn for candidates. The more people post about their own accomplishments and expertise, the more likely they are to be discovered. "More people need to know what you do and how you do it outside of your job, outside of the people you work with," she says.
The schism in workplace loyalty has altered the nature of job hunting. The need to go direct isn't just for founders or CEOs anymore; it's for the entire workforce.
LinkedIn, meanwhile, is taking steps to cut back on the slop, making the feed a place where more people engage with content they find useful or look to build up that portfolio. That means LinkedIn has to be a place for vanilla takes and midlevel expertise, not just spicy workplace stories and thought leaders.
"We want to protect authentic expertise and authentic conversations on LinkedIn," Suzi Owens, senior director of product communications at LinkedIn, tells me. "That's what it's all about, like real people sharing really real insights and their real lived experiences, and you should be able to show up who you are."
Authenticity on social media is in. On LinkedIn, your authentic self must also be a best-foot-forward, workplace-ready version of who you are.
LinkedIn has been building itself up as a social media platform over the past decade, during which it added video features, started a creator mode, and added skills training. During the Twitter exodus following Elon Musk's takeover of the platform in 2022, web traffic to LinkedIn grew. In the past three years, traffic has increased by nearly 16%, according to Similarweb data. The site's users have grown from 875 million in October 2022 to more than 1.3 billion today, according to the company. There are 1.7 million posts seen every minute, and the number of creators nearly doubled between 2021 and 2025. LinkedIn reported 12% revenue growth over the past year, and time spent on content grew by 10%.
As the platform has become more popular, people have mocked the "broetry" and verbose, performative nature of some posts, in which founders extract wisdom about B2B marketing from lessons learned coaching their kids' soccer teams. Redditors have collected these posts with a joyful derision and shared them across the LinkedIn Lunatics group, and some comedians have taken to LinkedIn with accounts devoted to satirizing the hustle-and-grind style of posts. It's all getting a bit cringe.
Then, AI lowered the bar to post lengthy workplace musings. Pangram, an AI-detection company, analyzed posts from LinkedIn, Medium, X, Reddit, and Substack, and found that LinkedIn had the highest proportions of likely AI-generated content: more than 30% of posts were deemed fully AI-written and nearly a quarter of the comments were flagged as likely AI-generated.
The accusations of LinkedIn's slopification have risen since LinkedIn built more AI into its platform to edit résumés and write comments, posts, and cover letters. Recruiters and job seekers alike have grown exasperated that AI makes it easy for people to apply to more jobs, jamming up the portals with applications that lack individuality and distinction. LinkedIn has responded by rolling out an AI-driven job match feature to highlight to job seekers if they would be a strong or weak fit for a role in 2024. The company backed away from the age-old job hunt advice to "just apply!" even if the job seems out of reach, and now gives people an analysis from its AI job match feature they can check before sending out a résumé.
LinkedIn obviously wants people to post more and comment more, but is cautious about AI dragging down the quality. The company removed the "enhance your post" AI writing feature in July and added a button that allows users to flag a post that "seems like AI slop." Since then, the slop emergency button has appropriately flagged AI slop 94% of the time, and the views on such content have dropped by 40%, Owens says. Hari Srinivasan, chief product officer at LinkedIn, posted that the company will soon have an AI proofreading feature that does not remove a person's voice from their posts. "We asked ourselves why do people post with AI anyway? The answer is LinkedIn isn't a one-word kind of place and they feel more confident running their posts through AI," he wrote.
If people are encouraged to use AI at work, they may feel more comfortable using it on a professional social network like LinkedIn than on platforms where they post more for friends and family, or to go viral. AI is also a shortcut for a new, typically unpaid responsibility to post regularly that some workers say they now feel pressured to do.
LinkedIn abounds with influencers, but the content some make about the workplace isn't necessarily safe for anyone to publicly engage with. Maureen Wiley Clough, who hosts the podcast It Gets Late Early and regularly posts on LinkedIn about ageism in the corporate world, says sometimes her followers will privately tell her they would have liked her content, but fear their boss would see it. "People are afraid that an errant like will be misconstrued," she says.
It's a tense situation where the culture on LinkedIn sometimes clashes with individual office cultures. And even if your posts don't rile your current boss, there's always a chance they could put off a potential new one.
Unlike other social media platforms, where rage bait and hot takes rise to the top, the ROI of LinkedIn can come to those who move quietly. "Recruiters are not looking for thought leaders," says Michelle Volberg, founder and CEO of Twill, a recruiting software company. They want some signal through the noise that people have expertise and tangible skills in their fields. When searching for candidates, Volberg says, she doesn't care if posts have four or 400 likes. While "it feels like you're posting to the void," she says, "you might not be, because somebody's going to come and creep along and look at your stuff."
The career experts I spoke to don't see any type of LinkedIn bubble bursting soon. For LinkedIn to be a place where people might enjoy spending time rather than feel compelled, cutting down on the slop might make or break the user experience. Love or hate the cringe, your career still depends on keeping up on LinkedIn.
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