Q: I recently took a redundancy package, and I am now job hunting. I've been told that ­LinkedIn is the place where I am most likely to find prospective employers, and have dutifully changed my avatar to "open for work". However, I have a feeling that Ireland is still all about "who you know", and I may do better by working my network of contacts. Is it worth paying for a full LinkedIn subscription, or what is your experience of modern job hunting?
LinkedIn used to carry an unspoken rule: don't say anything that could make your employer uncomfortable. Even professionals who were known to push the boundaries were self-censored when it came to posting on the platform. The cost of speaking freely felt higher than the upside. Layoffs changed that equation. When career paths became less predictable, the downside risk of being visible collapses. People who had just lost jobs or watched their entire team disappear suddenly were no longer optimizing for internal perception and honest reflection.
Stanley, an AI tool that helps LinkedIn creators, has added a new feature called Interview Me. With this feature, creators can have Stanley ask them a personalized question based on what works for their audience. Creators then record their answer as if they are explaining something to a friend or colleague. Stanley turns that response into a draft post that creators can edit before publishing to LinkedIn.
If the last decade has proved anything, it's this: the B2B marketing space is becoming more about people, stories, and meaningful connections. No more is it simply about product manuals and sales sheets; the landscape of B2B communications is taking on creative traits typically reserved only for B2C brands. And this development is a constantly accelerating force, fueled by the social media revolution that's made brands and professionals more visible, accessible, and human than ever before.
Your buyers are on these platforms every day, scrolling LinkedIn between meetings, watching YouTube explainers, and even picking up insights on TikTok. The good news is that most of your competitors aren't doing this well. And B2B social follows different rules. It's less about selling, more about showing up with value and building trust over time. This guide breaks down the platforms, strategy, and mistakes to avoid so you can stop blending in and start building something that drives real results.
When she hired a resume consultant for advice on getting her applications noticed, she expected she'd get formatting hacks or a crash course in keywords. Instead, the expert told Lily to scrub all but the last decade from her CV and LinkedIn page, effectively erasing more than half of her 25-year career history and her college graduation date. It was less about streamlining her qualifications than lying by omission.
As Wall Street obsessed over Microsoft's Azure growth rates and OpenAI accounting, LinkedIn quietly crossed $5 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time in the Redmond company's December quarter, up 11%. That puts the business social network on an annual run rate of more than $20 billion. LinkedIn is known for its recruiting tools and job postings, but given overall weakness in the job market, the latest growth is being fueled by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, its advertising business.
The company is partnering with Replit, Lovabl, Descript and Relay.app on the feature and is working on integrations with fellow Microsoft-owned GitHub as well as Zapier. LinkedIn has always allowed users to add various skills and certifications to their profiles. But what makes the latest update a bit different is that users aren't self-reporting their own qualifications. Instead, LinkedIn is allowing the companies behind the AI tools to assess an individual's relative skill and assign a level of proficiency that goes directly to their profile.
In 2024, Yanni Pappas was two months into his first full-time job as a business development representative (BDR) at Workshop-an Omaha-based company that provides internal communications teams with email marketing tools priced from $5,000 to $100,000 per year-when he got transferred to a new role. Now working as a "special products BDR," he was cut off from his company's inbound lead system, making his task of landing demos with prospective customers infinitely more difficult.
One of the earliest turning points in personal branding, one that made career-minded professionals understand that they're responsible for their careers and the visibility that shapes them, was the launch of LinkedIn in 2003. Since then, career visibility has followed a simple rule: polish your resume, keep your LinkedIn profile current and compelling, and show up to meetings awake. But that rule no longer holds, thanks to AI.
At the start of the year, we asked 11 experts to share their social media predictions for 2025. They pointed to big shifts - world-building, private communities, AI in everything and everywhere, LinkedIn's rise, and a creator economy moving toward more sustainable businesses. Now that the year is behind us, it's a good moment to pause and check the tape. Some predictions held up almost perfectly. Others played out more slowly or looked different than expected.
Rehmat Alam operates from the mountains of northern Pakistan, according to one of his online profiles. There, he flaunts his talent for harvesting LinkedIn data and advises YouTube viewers how to earn money off the internet. His company, ProAPIs, allegedly boasted in marketing materials that its software can handle hundreds of requests per second to scrape profiles, selling the underlying data for thousands of dollars a month.
As AI continues lowering the barrier to malicious identity spoofing and fraud, Oscar Rodriguez, LinkedIn's vice president of product for Trust,told ZDNET that the program is designed to drive more trustworthy internet experiences and user-to-user engagement. "It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between what is real and what's fake," Rodriguez noted. "That, for us, was the driver because LinkedIn is about trust and authentic connections."
Replying to comments on your LinkedIn posts can boost engagement by around 30%, according to a massive analysis by Buffer's data scientist, Julian Winternheimer. Julian analyzed 72,000 LinkedIn posts from nearly 25,000 accounts, and the pattern was clear: When creators engage back in their comments, their posts perform significantly better relative to their own baseline. This is one of my favorite data analyses we've done at Buffer, because it's hard evidence that giving back goes a long way.
According to numerous media sources and eyewitness accounts, the person you've known for almost a full decade, the one who seemed like a well-adjusted and productive member of society, is also shadowing as a person who writes long posts on LinkedIn talking about things like maximizing client engagement and how to nail job interviews at marketing firms. It's like your friend is secretly a completely different person-an alter ego who has completely immersed herself in the bizarre and alien social ecosystem of LinkedIn.
According to his account, Umang matched with a woman on Bumble and exchanged the usual introductory messages, basic questions, light conversation and a typical "getting to know each other" vibe. After a day of normal interactions, he assumed the match was progressing like any other early-stage dating chat. However, the next morning took a bizarre turn when he received a phone call, not from his match, but from her mother.
What makes LinkedIn uniquely powerful is not just its scale but its authenticity. It is the only major social platform where most people are verifiably real - not bots, not burners, not pseudonyms. It holds the cleanest, most trustworthy identity graph on the internet: a network tied to real employers, real skills, real locations, and real career histories. This should have been LinkedIn's greatest advantage. It is the foundation every modern professional platform wishes it had.