In a 2023 Pew survey of US adults, nearly one-third of respondents said they had used an online dating site or app at least once. More than half of women who had used the apps reported feeling overwhelmed by the number of messages they had received in the past year, while 64% of men said they felt insecure from the lack of messages they had gotten. Though an overwhelming majority of men and women said they’d felt excited about people they connected with, an even-larger proportion of respondents said they were sometimes or often disappointed by their matches.
Online, it isn’t always easy to know whether the human behind an alluring profile is who and what they say they are. Even relatively innocuous virtual deceptions – such as outdated or ultraflattering photos of themselves that misrepresent how they look in person or fudged facts about their interests and accomplishments – can be disheartening. Then there are the people who fabricate or steal their entire profile, a practice known as “catfishing,” leaving anyone getting hit up by a stranger online justifiably skeptical. All these deceptions have left many people with dating-app exhaustion as they search for ways to take back some control of their romantic fate.
LinkedIn’s interest just like the a dating website, predicated on those who put it to use in that way, ‘s the platform’s capacity to hand back several of one to control and you will boost the quality of the prospects. While the professional-networking site asks profiles to relationship to the most recent and you may previous employers’ reputation users, this has an extra level of dependability that almost every other public-mass media systems run out of. Of many profiles likewise incorporate earliest-individual sources of former acquaintances and you may executives – real people who have genuine reputation pages.
Even for people that timid of playing with LinkedIn to direction having dates, this site has become a go-so you can device to own vetting romantic people located by way of old-fashioned dating programs or in-people experiences
Some users have taken this idea to the extreme. Last summer, a British expat in Singapore, Candice Gallagher, made waves after send a great TikTok films in which Almodovar women seeking men she said LinkedIn had “A-grade filters” for finding “A-grade men” – namely, doctors, lawyers, and “finance bros.” In the post, she touted the various filters you could use to track down ideal partners. More recently, a screenshot of the tech entrepreneur George Hotz’s LinkedIn bio was shared on X. In his bio, Hotz declared that he now used the site “exclusively as a dating platform” and laid out a catalog of requisite attributes – “intelligent, attractive, female, in or visiting San Diego” – for his ideal match. “Send me a message and invite me out for a drink,” he wrote.
“Social media is the one large matchmaking application,” John told me. “Any kind of social media where you could select man’s images can change into the an online dating application. And you will LinkedIn is even better because it is just proving man’s phony lives.”
An issue of agree
Charlotte Warren, a 30-year-old content creator who lives in Austin, sees things differently. Warren posts TikTok films from the matchmaking and has received more than her fair share of advances from unknown men on LinkedIn. Though she said that the men were usually reaching out under some flimsy guise of professional networking or “mentorship,” many had bare-bones profile pages that suggested they weren’t seriously using the platform for work. Several of her friends and colleagues across genders have received similar messages, she said, and were similarly put off by them.
“Someone spends LinkedIn in another way, however, I think usually, anyone find it very invasive and improper” for all those for action in an effort to select intimate lovers, Warren said.