Hi! I’m LinkedIn Employee Jane Doe.
Welcome to LinkedIn. Welcome to the future. Connectivity is now, meaning is later and friendship is predicated on a mutually beneficial transaction of work.
Let’s get started!
If you've found yourself on this website, you’re probably here for one of many reasons:
- Someone mentioned updating their LinkedIn and you realize you haven't touched yours since graduation when you added your summer job at a local restaurant as a highlight. You can (should) delete that now.
- You're applying for a job and there was a space to add a LinkedIn profile link. You've applied to 45 other places, maybe this is the deal-breaker. (Warning: it's not)
- You’re on a self-improvement binge, stumbled across Linkedin through Lynda, the site for you to start learning a skill but slowly give up after a few hours because your commitment issues extend to being able to commit to yourself.
- You’ve been in academia for a couple of years, which is cute. But now, you actually need to be a labor-producing member of society! Self-actualization is SO important.
Warning: While we promise to boost your current career levels by over 100%, zero times 100% is still zero. Unfortunately, you might actually have to be worth something before you can benefit from LinkedIn.
Let’s go through our features!
You might notice there's an “Add connection” button. This is where you can randomly find people you slightly know, like students from your university that you’ve never spoken with but “you never know where they'll end up,” or “friends” from high school who have surprisingly gone farther than you would have expected. You might even be bold enough to connect to people in your second or third-degree connections! Or no degrees at all! What's a degree? Well, in the real world it’s an expensive piece of paper, but in LinkedIn Language, it's how we tempt you into finding and connecting with strangers. By pretending it’s completely okay to randomly connect with anyone because you happen to know someone in their circle. We modeled this system to real-world interactions that we observed from Hollywood executives recommending their fourth cousin twice removed to be the perfect intern at their friend’s company.
Once you figure out how to add people, start adding people! I mean, come on now, don't you want to have so many connections that your number is just an ambiguous 500+, indicating you have no true connections with anyone or that you're a soccer mom? The two are not mutually exclusive.
The next step is utilizing your dashboard for success. You will notice that your once-empty, opportunity-barren homepage is filled! We thought, because you aren't already addicted enough to the small amounts of dopamine your body still produces from e-mail and Facebook notifications, let’s make Linkedin more like social media! That includes a messaging feature and a rapidly updating wall filled with only the most nauseating passionate paragraphs from others about how they overcame everything to become even better! Because the only thing you need more than confidence and patience, is the reassurance that everyone else is doing better than you.
Below, our algorithm has neatly organized a list of paragraphs you’ll encounter:
- The “didn't shake this candidate’s hand during an interview because I was the first in my family to go to college, then I realized, despite also losing a leg and both of my eyes, that I was the problem.” A favorite among recruiters.
- Someone expressing how much they LOVED their summer internship and GREW so much.
- The “I’m excited to announce.” No one really asked for this announcement… but that’s okay!
- Positive pep chat from an out of touch CEO that we'll slip in every so often to remind you that this could have been you, if you had followed the simple step of being Oprah Winfrey.
We are absolutely positive that as you scroll through these, not only will your insecurity about your lack of self-achievement increase, you’ll develop a feedback loop of you returning to LinkedIn to compare your progress with your peers. We call that internal capitalism: instead of simply living in a competitive environment, you can create the stress of competition — inside! It's so effective, that suddenly you'll believe every mindless task is an accomplishment and get absolutely nothing done because you spent that time feeling sorry for yourself as you scrolled through our site. You'll soon be ready to craft your own nauseating inspiring paragraph. And don’t forget, it is social media, so comment away. Who cares if it’s genuine? Genuineness doesn’t pay the bills!
For a small, teenie, monthlyfeeof$17.99amonthwhichImsureyoucanaffordeventhoughyou'relookingforajob, you can upgrade to LinkedIn Premium. That comes with visitor-tracking, so you can monitor every single person that scrolls through your account and spend endless hours creating stories to justify why they were on your account and whether or not you need to change the adjective in your personal statement again... it's just coming across a bit strong, you know?
What are you waiting for? Snap a snazzy pic* of yourself in front of a white wall with your nicest business casual clothes and sign up today!
*If you're a woman, make sure your profile picture is a half smile smirk, or maybe a frown? Real women can’t smile if they want to be taken seriously. Duh!
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