LinkedIn, the work Instagram nobody believes anymore

LinkedIn, the work Instagram nobody asked for

Why does a professional log into LinkedIn? To look for a job, connect with colleagues or read relevant content. But it is getting harder and harder to dodge the posturing: interns forced to smile with boxes of products, holiday pictures in Formentera and empty motivational quotes from HR. Microsoft's social network has become a showcase of pretence where visuals matter more than usefulness.

Against this drift, tools have emerged such as Clear LinkedIn, an image blocker for the web that promises to bring the experience back to something close to what it used to be. Its creators present it as an "adblocker" for superfluous visual content. The users' response: relief. Because the problem is not just aesthetic: the visual noise hides the scarce supply of quality jobs.

Ghost vacancies and endless processes

Those who use LinkedIn to find a job run into another scourge: recruitment processes that never end. Several interviews, technical tests, practical exercises... and in the end, silence. It is not unusual for some users to simply block the recruiters who contact them, fed up with wasting their time. The feeling is that many vacancies are fictitious, only there to feed the database or give the company visibility.

At the same time, the quality of the listings has dropped. Fewer and fewer multinationals appear, and more small businesses or freelancers. Job ads from fake or AI-generated profiles are multiplying, which increases distrust.

The emperor has no clothes: posturing as the norm

The professional network has filled up with content that has little to do with work. Photos of smiling teams with sponsored products, empty reflections on success and a race for "likes" that is more reminiscent of Instagram than a business environment. Those who dare to point it out get the same diagnosis: "the emperor has no clothes". But the antiestéticar of being left out or seeming unprofessional keeps many in the game.

With the Clear LinkedIn alternative and the subreddits dedicated to denouncing these practices, part of the user base is starting to organise to recover the lost functionality. But until LinkedIn prioritises authentic content over posturing, the network will keep generating more cringe than real opportunities.