Picture this: you’re told that the key to career success is building your personal brand on LinkedIn - posting daily, curating a professional persona, engaging tirelessly with your network. Yet, in the back of your mind, a nagging question forms: who’s actually engaging back? In an age where conspiracy-tinged theories like the “Dead Internet” suggest much of the web is just bots talking to bots, the modern job seeker finds themselves caught in a bizarre paradox. We’re hustling to impress an algorithm on a platform where a significant chunk of the “engagement” might be fake. It’s like preparing for a job interview… with a room full of chatbots politely clapping. Welcome to the absurd reality of job hunting on LinkedIn in 2025.

The LinkedIn Engagement Illusion

Conventional wisdom insists that LinkedIn engagement is crucial for job hunting. Want that recruiter to notice you? Better rack up those likes and comments. The result: we’re all encouraged to post our accomplishments, lessons, and industry takes as if virality were a prerequisite for employability. On paper, it makes sense – a rich network and visible expertise can open doors. But scroll through your feed and you’ll notice something off-kilter: the engagement numbers are inflated by pods and bots, not genuine admirers. Many professionals quietly join “engagement pods” (basically you like my post, I’ll like yours clubs) or game the algorithm with strategic hashtags. Meanwhile, automated bots roam the platform, ready to drop generic compliments on any post that hits a keyword. The outcome is a surreal feedback loop where hollow metrics abound - posts with dozens of “Great insight!” comments that read like they were stamped out of the same template.

In fact, a recent study estimated that about a quarter of LinkedIn’s traffic isn’t even human . Think about that: you could be diligently crafting a post about the future of AI in finance, hoping to catch a hiring manager’s eye, and a portion of the views and likes it gets will come from bots. It’s engagement for engagement’s sake - the illusion of an attentive audience. We’re effectively performing for the algorithm, dancing in front of a funhouse mirror that makes our audience look bigger than it really is. If this is the best route to career success, one has to wonder: success with whom, exactly? The hiring manager, or the algorithm’s uncanny flock of fake followers?

#OpenToWork… and Open to Spam

Nothing epitomises this odd reality better than the experience of posting that you’re #OpenToWork. In theory, it’s a beacon to recruiters that you’re available. In practice, it’s more like chumming the waters and watching the spam-bots swarm. No sooner do you add the green “Open to Work” banner to your profile picture or make a post about your job search than generic recruiter bots slide into your DMs. “Dear Sir, I have reviewed your profile and have great opportunity for you…,” reads one message from an account that was created mere days ago. A user on Reddit described being “bombarded with bots for the next 45 minutes” after announcing their open-to-work status . The comments section of an #OpenToWork post often fills up fast, but not with real leads - instead you get dubious offers, duplicate comments from different profiles (a hallmark of bot automation), and a few advance-fee scam attempts for good measure (e.g. “Pay a small fee for access to premium job listings!” - hard pass) .

It’s disheartening and darkly comical. You post your earnest plea for employment, only to be cheered on by a chorus of bots and scammers. It’s as if the moment you signal vulnerability (“Looking for opportunities, please reach out!”), the Dead Internet comes alive to toy with you. Genuine recruiters do exist on LinkedIn, of course, but they’re swimming in the same sea of noise as everyone else. For every real message from a recruiter, you have to wade through ten copies of “Kindly share your resume, we have many openings that suit you perfectly!” (often followed by an ask to “visit our platform” which, surprise, isn’t a real company site). It’s engagement, alright - just the wrong kind. In this environment, the job seeker’s mantra quickly becomes “trust but verify” (or maybe “connect but be cautious”). When half the people congratulating you on your work anniversary are bots with stock-photo profile pics, it’s hard not to feel like you’re shouting into a void and getting an echo as a reply.

Dead Internet Theory: Bots Talking to Bots

All this leads to the eerie question: how much of our online interaction is real? Enter the Dead Internet Theory; the idea that much of the web’s content and activity today is artificially generated, maintained by bots, and essentially “dead” from a human perspective. It sounds like pure sci-fi (or the setup for a Matrix sequel), but it has gained traction as a kind of modern folklore precisely because it rings true on certain days . When your heartfelt LinkedIn article on leadership is met with a barrage of odd, stilted comments (“Good post. Please connect for business synergy.”) from accounts that may or may not be human, you can’t help but suspect that the internet is playing tricks on you.

Dead Internet Theory posits that at some point (around 2016, some say), the internet quietly “died” - meaning organic human activity was overshadowed by bots and AI-generated content. Scroll any social feed today and you’ll see why people get that impression. On LinkedIn especially, it sometimes feels like an office networking event where the nametags are real but the people are cardboard cutouts. There are engagement chains where bots applaud other bots, presumably to impress the algorithm overlords. Even human users start to adopt bot-like behavior: posting at optimal times, using formulaic content strategies, and responding with the same canned positivity (“Well said!” “Thanks for sharing!”) in hopes of pleasing the almighty feed algorithm. It’s a strange Turing test of a world - are we interacting with people, or just well-scripted personas? And if everyone sounds like a corporate chatbot, does it even matter? As one Guardian tech writer put it, a few years ago algorithms had people “acting like robots,” and now “the robots are posting like people” . The line between authentic user and automation blurs more each day.

The LinkedIn Influencer Circus (AKA Hustle Culture Hell)

Nowhere is this blur more obvious than in the rise of LinkedIn influencers and hustle culture. Yes, those folks treating a professional network like their personal TED Talk stage, complete with daily inspirational posts and hashtagged mantras. In the quest for visibility, LinkedIn’s content has evolved (or devolved) into a peculiar genre. There’s even a name for its signature style of post: “broetry.” If you’ve spent any time on LinkedIn, you’ve probably seen broetry in the wild – those posts composed of one-line paragraphs stacked like a poetry slam piece, usually starting with a dramatic hook and ending with an uplifting cliché. For example, a broetry post might start with “I was rejected from my dream job.” Next line: “I felt like a failure.” Next: “But I got up the next morning and…” (you can almost hear the crescendo) “…applied to ten more, and by the end of the week, I had an offer. Never give up.” Cue 10,000 likes. As one commentary described it, broetry is basically an “inspirational lesson” wrapped in “tired cliché” and unnecessary line breaks . Look familiar? You’ve just read a broem.

The absurdity of LinkedIn hustle culture is that it compels everyone to act like a micro-influencer. It’s not enough to be good at your job; you also need to perform your professional passion for an audience. Every promotion becomes a carefully crafted humblebrag story. Every failure becomes fodder for a post about “what it taught me about leadership.” Even mundane daily events can be spun into content: spilled your coffee this morning? Time to churn out a post about “resilience and learning to adapt” (complete with a photo of your sad coffee cup and a #MondayMotivation hashtag). The hustle bros and self-styled gurus eat this stuff up and the algorithm often rewards it. It’s to the point that the LinkedIn feed feels like a content farm of recycled wisdom and performative positivity . Carefully crafted hooks? Check. Emotionally charged yet generic lessons? Check. And let’s not forget the engagement bait: posts that end with “What do you think? Let me know in the comments!” or those clickbait polls asking absurd questions just to boost interaction.

Current trends only crank the dial to 11. We saw the rise (and merciful fall) of LinkedIn “Stories,” attempts to mimic Instagram-style snippets on a platform where few wanted them. We’ve witnessed content “brofessionals” sharing video reels of themselves delivering pep talks in their cars. There are pods coordinating to boost each other’s “Top Voice” status and engagement hackers treating LinkedIn like a growth experiment. And of course, the classic “I quit my 6-figure job to backpack in the Himalayas, and it was the best decision of my life #FollowYourDreams” posts that invariably go viral. The platform has essentially become a parody of itself - a place where genuine professional updates mix with what can only be described as motivational content farming. It’s equal parts inspiring and cringeworthy, often depending on your tolerance for buzzwords and staged authenticity. The overall effect is a kind of professional theatre: everyone is an actor, the stage is your LinkedIn timeline, and the audience… well, as established, the audience might be half bots anyway.

Personal Brand vs. Personal Sanity

The expectation to “build your brand” would be laughable if it weren’t so widely preached by career coaches. For extroverts and natural self-promoters, maybe it’s fun - they treat LinkedIn like their personal reality show and thrive on the attention. But for many people - myself included - the mandate to constantly self-promote feels about as comfortable as wearing a full suit and tie to a beach party. Not everyone has the time (or desire) to become a content creator on top of their day job. Many of us are juggling long work hours, family responsibilities, actual work (imagine that!) - and now we’re told that after dinner we should crank out a heartfelt post about “What eating chicken and chips taught me about crypto marketing” to stay relevant. It’s exhausting. It’s also a bit dystopian: your value in the job market starts to feel tied to your social media performance rather than your actual skills.

Consider the personality types that thrive in this arena. They’re the ones who don’t mind tooting their own horn every day, who can effortlessly turn a minor accomplishment into a 12-line saga of triumph, complete with emojis and a sprinkle of #grateful #leadership hashtags. But what about the rest of us - those who prefer to let our work speak for itself, or who cringe at the idea of engagement baiting our friends and colleagues? For us, LinkedIn’s personal branding pressure is a special kind of torture. We know we should post more, comment more, “build our network” more. We feel the platform subtly punishing our silence by making us invisible in the feed. Yet when we try to participate, it can feel forced and phony. There’s a real tension between authenticity and visibility: sharing only when you have something meaningful to say versus sharing frequently because the algorithm demands it. In the hustle culture paradigm, frequency often wins. And so, many reluctant users either resign themselves to the game or disengage entirely, ceding the floor to the influencers and bots.

Navigating the Absurd New Normal

At the end of the day, the contrast between LinkedIn’s ideal and its reality is almost laughable. On one side, we’re told LinkedIn is the place to showcase your professional self, to network genuinely, to land that dream job through thoughtful engagement. On the other side, we’re grappling with a feed where genuineness competes with gamification. The Dead Internet lens suggests a bleak (if tongue-in-cheek) outlook: maybe a lot of this isn’t even real. Maybe we’re performers on a stage where half the audience are bots clapping on cue . And the real people? They’re out there, but their voices are drowned in the din, unless they too learn to speak in algorithm-friendly soundbites.

Is there a way out of this absurdity? Perhaps the pendulum will swing back to authenticity - we can only hope. Maybe recruiters will wise up and pay more attention to resumes and portfolios again, not just someone’s follower count or post frequency. Maybe LinkedIn will get better at weeding out bots so that a sincere “I’m open to opportunities” post actually connects you with humans who can help. Until then, we soldier on in this strange new world. We polish our personal brand because we feel we have to, yet we do it with a knowing smirk and a dash of cynicism. We swap stories (in private chats, of course) about the ridiculous comments we got from “Mike, MBA” whose profile has one connection and a profile pic that definitely came from thispersondoesnotexist.com. We laugh at the latest viral broetry thread while secretly pondering if we should try something similar, just once, to see if it boosts our visibility.

© Copyright Disney

Ultimately, navigating a job search in this environment requires a sense of humour and a firm grip on reality. The humour, because if you don’t laugh at the sheer absurdity of bot comments and engagement farming, you’ll cry. The grip on reality, because you must remind yourself that real opportunities come from real connections, and those still exist beneath the layers of noise. So go ahead, build your LinkedIn brand if you must – post that insightful take on industry trends, share your project wins - just don’t lose sight of the fact that not all that glitters in your notification feed is gold. Some of it is just the dull sparkle of fool’s gold, brought to you by an algorithm in an internet that can feel a little dead at times. And if you ever feel overwhelmed by it all, take comfort in this tragically humorous thought: somewhere out there, two bots are probably networking with each other, convincing themselves they’ve really made it.

And yes. I see the irony in writing this article and then posting it on LinkedIn.