I have been recently observing so many posts on LinkedIn advertising for vacancies, WhatsApp groups, etc. and then asking people to press Like or Comment and promising to review their profile. I have no issue with seeing such posts as people are free to post what they want to post and there is no practical way of stopping this recent posting trend. However, what is more troubling and upsetting is seeing the big number of Likes and Comments to these posts and below are just few examples.

Through this article, I am basically planning to provide some awareness and insight to LinkedIn professionals to avoid falling for these kind of posts or “scams” and help them to understand the reality behind it.

Let me first elaborate how it logically and technically makes no sense to go through all these Likes and Comments and that even if it did, it would be a waste of time.

If you look at the first example image above, it is a vacancy post for Business Researching Consultants. Below are my observations:

• First of all, your LinkedIn profile is not your CV and it normally does not have all your career or contact details compared with your CV and if some people are reflecting their whole CV in their profile then they do not understand the objective of LinkedIn. So if I was the poster for this vacancy and checked your high-level LinkedIn profile which does not include much details, what benefit will I get from checking your profile?
• And let’s say I saw your profile interesting, how do I communicate with you if I can’t see your email or send you a message? Do I have to send you a Connect request? Will I have to send a Connect request to all the ones which I find interesting so that I can talk to you? And eventually find out that your CV is not relevant to the vacancy. Wouldn’t that be a huge waste of time?
• Now if you look at the second comment in the image you will see that the “applicant” is not relevant to the vacancy and is looking for a job in banking. Now imagine if this is the reality of 70% of the ones who made Likes and Comments (statistically, this is very possible, you may even find that only 5% are relevant).
• Now let’s say that assumingly 70% of these “applicants” are irrelevant, wouldn’t it make more sense to just make a Search for people on LinkedIn to find those with Business Research Consultancy experience and end up finding 90% relevant candidates?
• Wouldn’t it also make more sense to include the email address of the poster in the post so that he/she can 1) receive detailed CVs with contact details and be able to filter out irrelevant applicants and 2) build a database of CVs for free at the same time

If you look at the second example image above: the poster is planning to create a WhatsApp group for Engineers to share relevant vacancies. Below are my observations:

• First of all, correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t the maximum number of members that you can add to one WhatsApp group is a 100 member. What are you going to do with the remaining 5,570 people who made Likes and Comments?
• Is it really safe to write your mobile number in public and end up with so many marketing SMSs and messages?
• Wouldn’t it make more sense to create a LinkedIn Group for that purpose?

So why do they make these posts if they are that useless to achieve the purpose mentioned in the post?

Below are few of the reasons which I believe could be the reality behind these posts:

• This is number one reason: the poster’s objective is to spread the post to as many people as possible. And as such, they actually ask you to specifically click Like or Comment as when you do so, it will appear to all your connections in their LinkedIn News Feed that you liked or commented on this post and when your connections do the same it keeps spreading like a virus.
• The posters may actually be looking at increasing their followers and connections for the purpose of getting higher traffic or profile views.
• There is also a possibility that the poster wants to increase the number of his connections so that he/she can later download their emails for sales and marketing purposes. Yes, LinkedIn has a feature that allows you to download the email addresses of your contacts among other things. I shall later write an article to explain how this is done.
• Another reason could be that there is no actual vacancy at the moment but the poster wants to increase the branding of his company and potentially increase the followers of the company page.
• Now sometimes the posters do mention an email address to send the CV to. However, in most of these posts I believe that the actual purpose is just to build up a database of CVs for free and that there is no actual vacancy available.

In conclusion, my recommendation would be not to fall for these scams and look for other effective ways for applying for jobs.

You may want to have a look at the below article which provides effective guide on how to find your next job.

(Hunt for your next job like a Sales professional …)

I hope that you found this article very useful and relevant. Please share it with your connections to increase the awareness and fight this waste of time trend.