I’ve been looking for gig work lately and, as part of my search, I naturally went to LinkedIn to see what was there.
Sure enough, when I clicked on some link, I was confronted with a dialog box inviting me to subscribe to their premium service in order to see some leads. The monthly fee, at that point (October 2024), was $67 a month after a free month’s trial. This is how it works:
After receiving notifications for search results and then coming up against that same dialog box many more times, I finally broke down and stopped resisting the marketing ploy. I started my free trial.
This service for leads seems to be a new offering by LinkedIn. Be that as it may, it’s been quite surprising to see how poorly the AI behaves and how even more poorly the customer support has been. But I digress…
I responded to several leads at first, both submitting a proposal and messaging the prospective client, as encouraged by LinkedIn’s prompts. Surprisingly, out of about twenty leads I responded to, I received only two responses. One is a request for a Zoom meeting for a ghostwriting project and the other was a rejection.
After about a week or so of receiving leads from the strangest of places well outside of North America (Albania, India, Pakistan, South Africa…). I began to look a lot more closely at the lead posters. Some seemed legitimate on the surface, but when doing basic searches on them they turned out to be ghosts. The vast majority of lead posters, it was turning out, are gig seekers like myself with some skills similar to mine.
I filed several support tickets, at first to complain about the fact that no leads were from the US. The process of chatting with support begins with an AI bot and asking to be transferred to a human. Then, quite oddly, after telling the human what the problem is, the process involves them opening a ticket, documenting the issue and then handing it off to a different department. Once the handoff is done, the ticket is automatically closed and paying customers are then expected to wait for an email response. So far, out of four such tickets, all human responses have been similar:
When I pointed out that the leads are from other service providers also seeking work, the live support representative remarked “that is strange!” then doing the same thing the others did, which is kick it up to the ads team after opening a ticket. The ticket then got closed and round and round I went…
Based on the responses I’ve received from the ads marketing support specialists, it has become clear to me that this LinkedIn product isn’t ready for prime time and shouldn’t be offered as a subscription for as long as it remains useless to the degree it has been for me.
The other thing I did in furtherance of my quest for work, is switch my status to open to work. That set off a deluge of messaging from “recruiters” who after requesting a copy of my resume, immediately asked if they could provide resume writing services in exchange for…. $70-150. One of them even tried to bargain when I said no…
I’ve had a presence on LinkedIn for a couple of decades. I’ve never had a successful experience seeking any kind of work there. I’ve mostly used my account to stay in touch with people I’ve known or worked with in the past.
Oh, and… The other very odd thing that happened is that someone new started following me. Upon looking at their profile, I learned that they joined LinkedIn in early December this year. Look at the number of followers this account was able to garner in the space of a few days!
And, of course…
I am obviously going to cancel Premium. I am seriously considering shutting down my LinkedIn account entirely. It’s been pretty useless. At $67 a month, this Premium subscription is more scam than anything else.
Subscriber, beware!
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