LinkedIn Is Not a Network. It Is an Extraction Platform

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By Cliff Potts
CSO & Editor-in-Chief, WPS News

LinkedIn presents itself as a professional network. In practice, it is something else entirely: an extraction platform that shifts the cost and risk of hiring away from employers and onto workers. That design choice is not accidental, and it explains why relying on LinkedIn for meaningful professional connectivity is increasingly futile.

At the surface level, LinkedIn offers visibility, connections, and opportunity. Underneath, it operates on a simple economic inversion: those seeking work are increasingly expected to pay for access, visibility, and basic functionality, while the institutions with capital—employers, recruiters, and corporations—are insulated from both cost and accountability. This reversal is not innovation. It is a market failure dressed up as a service.

In any functional labor market, the party with money pays for access to talent. Employers pay recruiters. Companies pay placement firms. Organizations absorb the cost of finding labor because they are the beneficiaries of that labor. That principle is not ideological; it is structural. When job seekers are instead asked to subsidize the hiring process—through premium subscriptions, boosted visibility, or algorithmic tolls—the system is no longer a market. It is a funnel.

LinkedIn’s defenders often argue that premium features “increase your chances” or “improve visibility.” That framing quietly admits the truth: organic participation is deliberately insufficient. Visibility is throttled by design, then sold back to the user. The platform does not connect people; it meters access to attention. What appears to be a professional commons is, in reality, a paywalled marketplace where desperation is the primary commodity.

This is why LinkedIn feels simultaneously crowded and empty. There is constant activity—posts, reactions, engagement theater—but little functional exchange. Recruiters harvest resumes at scale while remaining unaccountable. Companies post roles that may never be filled. Job seekers perform optimism and resilience for an algorithm that is indifferent to both. Connectivity becomes performative rather than transactional. Signal is drowned by noise because noise is profitable.

From an executive standpoint, the ethical problem is obvious. A system that extracts money from those least able to afford it while shielding those with capital is not neutral. It incentivizes volume over fit, appearance over substance, and compliance over competence. It also externalizes failure. When hiring does not work, the burden is placed on the individual: optimize your profile, rewrite your headline, pay for more exposure. The platform itself is never at fault.

Strategically, this is corrosive. Organizations that rely on LinkedIn as a primary talent pipeline are not sourcing the best candidates; they are sourcing the most compliant ones—the people willing to perform unpaid labor, tolerate opacity, and absorb cost without leverage. Over time, that degrades institutional quality. Systems that filter for desperation do not produce excellence. They produce exhaustion.

There is also a deeper cultural consequence. By normalizing worker-paid access to employment, LinkedIn reinforces a broader shift in modern labor: the erosion of bargaining power and the privatization of risk. Workers are told to brand themselves, market themselves, and finance their own extraction, all while being reminded that opportunity is scarce and competition is endless. This is not networking. It is conditioning.

None of this means LinkedIn is useless in all contexts. It functions tolerably as a directory, a signaling space, and a recruiting convenience for firms that already know what they are looking for. But as a pathway to real professional connection, advancement, or opportunity—especially for those without institutional backing—it is structurally unsound.

The core issue is not user behavior. It is not effort. It is not optimization. It is design. LinkedIn was built to monetize imbalance, and it performs that function efficiently. Expecting it to deliver equitable connectivity or meaningful opportunity misunderstands what the platform is.

Cold analysis leads to a cold conclusion: LinkedIn does not fail accidentally. It succeeds at what it was designed to do. And what it was designed to do is extract.