How to Make a Somewhat Decent LinkedIn Profile

Become minimally functional on the world’s most insufferable website.

Photo by Greg Bulla on Unsplash

Despite its glaring faults, LinkedIn remains useful for two key reasons:

(1) It has a database of people to network with and contact individually.

(2) It provides an easily accessible list of available jobs.

These two things remain uber-valuable no matter what the temperamental economy or oscillating job market decides to do this week. But to leverage those two features, you need to zen out and tolerate all the bullshit that overpopulates your newsfeed and email.

I would put at least 90% of LinkedIn newsfeed content and spam-like emails into four categories:

1. Narcissistic self-congratulatory posts for trivial achievements

2. Fictitious employment tales filled with platitudes attempting to be inspirational

3. Corporate marketing or personal marketing that feels vaguely corporate

4. Clickbait news articles that repurpose things people said in other clickbait articles

Sigh.

Despite millions of users, there is a lack of exciting, substantive content on LinkedIn. Instead, they’ve purposefully optimized their algorithms to push low-quality…