All that glitters is not gold(LinkedIn Edition)

As Shakespeare once wrote in one of his masterpieces The Merchant of Venice, “All that glisters is not gold” now replaced by the more convenient word “glitters” to express the idea of how things might seem more precious, shiny or physically attractive than they actually hold the value for. This old yet famous proverbial saying fits a lot of scenarios in the modern world especially due to snowballing effect of media influence and social platforms. The social networking sites like Facebook and Instagram are the perfect examples of how everything can be shown larger than life by concealing the less suited aspects in the metaphorical closet. How one click takes away hours of your valuable time and before you realize the wasted hours all that is left is a sinking feeling that everyone except you is living a perfect and most beautiful life. But let’s talk about a less obvious, slightly different type of social platform. As if the perfect portrayal of personal lives was not causing enough damage to everyone’s psyche, LinkedIn has provided a platform to people to advertise their self-gratifying never ending achievement spree. Now before we proceed further I want to clarify from my end that the incredible benefits of this platform and its utility are beyond debate. The LinkedIn slogan on their company page says “Connecting the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”. So, the idea of LinkedIn must be to create a platform where like-minded professionals would connect, grow their network, where people could find their dream job, make that perfect switch to the top listed company, demonstrate their skills and expertise, and grow and succeed in their career. So, one would certainly expect high quality of content from educated and professional users.

When I first joined LinkedIn, my aim was to connect with professionals from the Industry and build the network around those people, to look for job opportunities, engage in meaningful conversations and build my career in a reputed company. At the risk of sounding a little pessimistic I feel this hasn’t happened yet. Though, I found some great people who helped me in any way they could, mentored me and inspired me, I connected with Recruiters and HR professionals from my industry but as I built my network, there began a steady and overwhelming stream of self-promotion, covert and overt advertising, continued spamming of low quality content and pseudo-motivational posts . Now, some of these are easy to filter from newsfeed as one has some level of control over the quality of content. This also comes with gradual experience by tweaking who to follow and weeding out the ones contributing to poor quality content. However, it starts to get difficult and more twisted while figuring out people who indulge in gross self-promotion via lie and deceit engaging in constant reposting of already plagiarized content and making the platform at times grotesque to follow. This is where the pros of an amazing platform like LinkedIn stops and cons start, and one wonders if all that glitters is really gold, as for one, some of the posts are outright lies. Some of these people would post that they can help you connect with recruiters and senior HR professionals, can refer you in a company or shape your resumes. People instantly like, comment on and share these posts which give these posts more visibility and reach increasing their Social Selling Index (SSI). Before doing any of these one must ensure if the person is actually capable of doing what he is claiming or is it just another self-promotional lie. Besides, there are people who indulge in self-aggrandizement through fake skills in their profile along with tons of worthless & sham certifications which don’t really justify their experience and try to mislead the recruiters wasting their time. As if these were not enough, the most damage this causes is to the self-worth of a normal person like me or you who cannot see through all these lies and deceit and go on a constant rat-race of “self-improvement”.

Another problem with the shiny things available in LinkedIn is the risk they put their users of getting scammed. One of the most common of these is fake job offers which mostly target unsuspecting users desperately looking for a job. People falling prey to these ‘glittering’ offers generally end up sharing confidential information, paying large sums as upfront fees or working free for a few months of so called training period. One more of such spams is Connection request from a fake but very similar looking original LinkedIn email id with descriptive romantic or job related messages. Clicking on any link in the email can send you to a malicious website leading to installation of ZeuS or similar information theft software. 

There are a lot of examples in modern context for the things that are shiny but not worthy however to write something closer to home was the primary objective I wanted to target. The LinkedIn website with its incredible benefits also provides a platform to the glittering objects with no value and the sad part is people tend to fall for it more than often.