What the hell is LinkedIn?

I know what LinkedIn wants to be. It wants to be the amalgamation of Facebook and Monster.com. A place where you can network online without the cocktail party. It lets peers see your resume and recommend it and you to prospective employers. In theory, this is a workable idea, but in practice it's akin to cutting your bare chest with glass in order to get noticed at a club.

LinkedIn wants to be the professional Facebook even though Facebook already is the professional Facebook. Every company is thinking about how to incorporate Facebook and Twitter into their marketing and publicity. Everybody my age and up has a Facebook account and edits it because they know it's the online face they present to their employers both real and imagined. If you Google yourself and you aren't famous, your Facebook comes up in the top five search results. Privacy settings aside, you don't put anything on Facebook you don't want floating around at your job. You're probably friends with your coworkers, and if you have clients/authors/musicians to represent/edit/produce then you probably have a Facebook connection with them. Drunk photos of you whipping out your sexual organs at a drug deal turned wacky are not going on your Facebook.

This doesn't mean that you can't relax on Facebook; you just have to decide how much of yourself goes into it unedited. You can still relax by tagging funny photos of moving into a new apartment or Halloween costumes that make you look slightly more interesting than Business Casual Friday. LinkedIn offers no opportunity to relax. Every step you take on LinkedIn is measured by a completeness percent that includes uploading your resume, getting recommendations from peers, writing objective statements, and outlining your specialties. It's all about building the perfect sales pitch masquerading as a social networking profile. For those looking for work, every step is a desperate attempt for someone to notice and employ you. The flip side is that it's a great way to brag about your success to people who will never, ever take the time to be impressed by your profile.

It wants to be a more social and relaxed Monster.com, but all the pressure of creating a profile has just made it socially dysfunctional. LinkedIn drags out the awkward feeling of trying to network at a professional open bar over the course of days thanks to all the profiles you have to connect to, recommend, and get recommended by. It's socialization marred by the implication that you're only here because you want something. You're on LinkedIn because you need a job or you need to show off what you have. The worst part is that LinkedIn rarely gets any worthwhile job opportunities out there. The anxious hours you spend crafting your useless LinkedIn profile probably will get you nothing in return. The ten minutes you spend uploading a resume to Monster.com or Indeed.com will at least get lots of positions to apply to. A website dedicated to careers should be able to deliver jobs to the user at a rate higher than the average rainfall in Arizona. You could use LinkedIn instead of Monster.com, but that would be like a hospital using leeches instead of an MRI.