A friend recently asked me to help her look for a job. She wanted help writing a cover letter, a CV and an update on her LinkedIn profile. The first two tasks were easy, but the third? Not so much.
If, like me, you haven’t been on LinkedIn for a while, it is – for lack of a better word – weird, now. What used to be a perfunctory, professional space sitting in stark contrast to the oversharing of other social media, LinkedIn is now full of 1,000-word polemics from unqualified people (“here’s really what makes people tick” says a “wizard of wellbeing”), photos of holidays (“work hard, play hard!”) and empty motivational platitudes (“give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to code and …” OK, sorry, I did just make that one up). It’s all a bit cultish, and work is what is worshipped. Stepford Wives, employment edition.
