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Should I Post Political Content On LinkedIn?

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LinkedIn is a social networking platform for working professionals. On this platform, you promote your personal brand, network with other professionals, and, when needed, use it to find a new job. LinkedIn is a formal business setting. When you throw politics into the mix, things can get volatile and may invite unwelcome career blowback.

Let’s say you tell somebody you want a pizza and they take you to a hot dog stand. That’s what you’re doing when you go political on LinkedIn.

The primary recommendation of this article is to think twice before posting anything political on LinkedIn. Please don’t get me wrong - political discourse is absolutely essential, and plays an integral role in being a good citizen. But make sure you’re using the right platform.

Naturally, many fields of endeavor are intimates of politics, such as journalism or lobbying or holders of political office, so this recommendation does not apply to everyone. Just bear in mind.

1.     LinkedIn is a professional platform. When was the last time you were in your cubicle at work, stood on top of your desk, and publicly shared your unsolicited political views? After hearing your dazzling opinions about the solvency of Social Security and the fate of democracy, did your boss rush out of his/her office and give you a raise and a promotion? Hopefully, you hear how ridiculous that sounds. Nobody wants to hear your political views. Nobody cares about your political views. At a minimum, choosing to post political content on LinkedIn displays a monumental lack of judgment. Read the room.

2.     Why LinkedIn? What was so important that you had to share it with your professional network? You’re an accountant. Why do the other accountants you’re connected to need to know what you think about IVF? They don’t. The internet is full of websites where you can espouse your political views. There are so many political sites and platforms where you can post and respond to people in the comments that aren’t your co-workers or potential future employers/clients/investors/etc. You can even find a safe little political bubble where no matter what you say people will agree with it.

3.     No matter what you post, anything political will be inherently divisive. America has always had political polarization and now is no different, except we have the internet, which was originally set up to allow college professors to share intellectual and is now a grotesque political shouting match between a statistically small group of barbarians. Thank God for the cat videos or this whole internet thing would be a complete loss. Why do you want to be divisive? You may have to work with Craig on the next big project. Is it going to help you achieve your business goals if Craig’s LinkedIn feed is full of your views about inflation? Ukraine? Reproductive rights? Crime? Wouldn’t a sweet video of a kitten riding on a turtle’s back with the caption, “Believe in Yourself and You Will be Unstoppable,“ be better? Yes. Yes, it would.

4.     Posting on LinkedIn is about drawing attention to yourself, your work, or what impressive thing your company just did. It’s about eliciting a positive response. Political content is guaranteed to elicit positive and negative responses, and those conflicting views can carry on, without regulation and, sometimes, with alarming vitriol, in the comments. Those people are just as guilty of platform malfeasance as the poster. If you elect to see political content (more on that at the end), it is recommended you resist the temptation to participate in whatever exchanges may be taking place no matter how inflamed your political passions. Once again, there are plenty of other places to talk politics.

5.     If there is one right everybody agrees each of us has, it’s the right to take whatever profound stupidities enter our brains and unleash them on the world through our mouths (or keyboards). It’s called free speech and, technically, we’re supposed to defend each other’s right to say what we want even if we disagree with it. That is noble. The reality is that most people don’t get along, but at work, in a professional setting, you must get along to achieve your primary objective of being paid. It’s that simple. Think of LinkedIn as a professional setting. It’s in your best interests to get along with everybody who may encounter your profile. Posting political content will not promote harmony.

LinkedIn can’t tell people what to post and they shouldn’t. However, political content creates a divide between LinkedIn’s user-generated content and its mission, which is to be the leading professional social media platform and to have influence in the job market. LinkedIn has empowered every user to shut it off. Out of sight, out of mind.

You keep your LinkedIn feed politics-free (of others’ content) by doing the following:

Visit this page in your LinkedIn Settings: https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/settings/feed-preferences

Turn off the box that says “Show political content”:

That’s it! Happy LinkedIn usage.


 Philip Roufail contributed to this article.

Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, career coaching services, and outplacement services. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercs.com.

New Job? Time To Tell The World On LinkedIn!

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You got the job! Congratulations! Once you’ve told your parents, friends, and significant other it’s time to brag a little where it really counts - LinkedIn.

Starting a new job is a major milestone and transition. You want your professional network to know how amazing you are, so LinkedIn is the perfect place to post a formal announcement about your new position. It’s nice to watch the comments fill up with stuff like, “Congratulations!” Etc. However, by posting a new job announcement on LinkedIn you can accomplish more than just a lot of justifiable kudos.

You’re not just starting a new job. You’re leaving an old one, and no matter how it played out it was and will always be an important part of your professional journey. Moving forward, it is advantageous to maintain relationships with your former coworkers so they will enthusiastic members of your professional network. Keep that in mind when you’re crafting your announcement.

The announcement may drive traffic to your profile, which you may find desirable. If you post on LinkedIn, people will periodically see your posts but that does not automatically mean more profile views. However, an announcement of this kind piques others’ interest so you want to make sure your profile is in its best form like making your house spotless before having company over.

Ready? Let’s run through a quick checklist that will make your announcement a breeze.

  1. Important: Do not take any of the actions described in this checklist or post your announcement until you’ve started the new job. Put it on your Day 1 list, but not before. Life is unpredictable and the last thing you want to deal with is a retraction due to a change in business conditions or an unanticipated blip on your background check (oops).

  2. LinkedIn has a function that allows your network or the general public to see any significant changes you make to your profile. For example, when you change the company name on your profile from Old Company to New Company, LinkedIn will automatically post in your feed that you’ve made that change. The same goes for other changes. It’s up to you if you wish for updates to trickle out in this fashion or if you would rather make all the updates first. You can enable or disable this function in your general settings.

  3. Check the email address you have tied to the account. Is it a personal email address or the one from your old job? If it’s an old job email address you’ll want to update it with your new work email, which should be provided to you on your first day, or to a personal email if you would rather receive emails there.

  4. If you have an old profile picture, now is the time for a new one. Keep it professional. A photo of you on a beach somewhere is for Instagram or TikTok, not LinkedIn (unless your job is managing that beach!).

  5. Change the essential information in your LinkedIn profile header - new company name, new title, location (if applicable), and descriptors.

  6. It’s your first day so there is no expectation that your new job section is going to be complete with job duties and accomplishments. It’s up to you, but just so it’s not blank you may consider a few lines describing the company itself and what your new role will be in it.

  7. If there are any related LinkedIn groups or organizations related to your new position now is the time to join them. For example, let’s say your new job is working for a university. Search for alumni groups, education groups/organizations, or whatever is most aligned with your position and ask to join their community.

  8. Even if you’re a LinkedIn super-user and post content every day (only a small percentage of LinkedIn’s billion users are content creators), you probably don’t spend a lot of time on your profile. When you’re going to announce a big transition, it’s time to review every section of your profile to see if everything is still the way you want it. You may find a typo you never noticed before, or perhaps a description you wrote a year ago isn’t up to your current standards. Maybe it’s all perfect. The only way you will know is if you read it top to bottom with a critical eye.

  9. Now it’s time for the big announcement. As previously mentioned, your lead should be an acknowledgment of your previous job and gratitude to your former co-workers and mentors. This will go a long way. If you left on poor terms, or the experience was a nightmare, you can still muster a generic thank you for the experience, which taught you something – even if it was what not to do (just don’t use that phrase!).

  10. In the second part of your announcement, say how excited you are to join your New Company and make it the best business that has ever existed on planet Earth. Be as humble as possible while you pat yourself on the back for landing what may be the best job ever created since the dawn of time.

  11. You have one more step before you post your public announcement. Write a less formal “heads up” message to your LinkedIn network connections and send it just before posting the public announcement.

  12. Post your public announcement and bask in the adulation that will certainly come your way. You deserve it. And make sure to respond kindly to the posts in which people congratulate you.



Philip Roufail contributed to this article.

Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, career coaching services, and outplacement services. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercs.com.

You Can Use AI To Write Your Resume and LinkedIn – Is It A Good Idea?

Welcome to the brave new world of the upsides of artificial intelligence (AI) – the robots are on the way and they’re going to help you with your resume and LinkedIn profile! 

Is it true? Partially. It’s easy to imagine a day when AI will provide fully “ready-for-primetime” career materials. And that’s great! It’s going to help democratize the job hunt and potentially remove barriers to those who have difficulty in this area.

First, it’s important to remember that artificial intelligence is powered by human intelligence; let’s dispel the notion that you’re going to push a button and your new best friend AI is going to crank out a resume or LinkedIn profile that’s ready for prime time. AI can help you accomplish what you want but it can’t do it alone – but you must be AI’s partner and collaborator.

The trick is to remember that AI can do a lot of great things. It really can. But it is incapable of inherently knowing you. AI can’t know who you are and what you’re made of, so must take AI by the hand, so to speak, and lead it to where you want to go.

If you decide you want to use AI tools to help you with your resume and LinkedIn profile, to be successful you’ll need to consider the following:

1.     AI is a starting point and not an endpoint. As previously mentioned, AI isn’t going to spit out any document that’s ready to go. Have realistic expectations. What AI will do is give you a solid template on which you can build. In this way, it’s an accelerator. For many, the first step is the most difficult. Let AI take that step for you but know that it’s going to pass the baton to you and you must finish the race.

2.     AI is only as good as its data. The “G” in ChatGPT stands for “generative,” which means it generates an answer based on research it conducts in the blink of an eye. That means the answer is only as good as the source of its research, and AI isn’t always accurate. You have no idea what data source the AI is mining, so be sure to incorporate having to revise the ChatGPT product into your workflow.

3.     AI doesn’t have a voice. AI has a language all its own and it is distinctly not human. Yes, you can ask AI tools to crank out a paragraph in some well-known author’s style that when first read seems amazing, but after the first impression you realize it is, for lack of a better word, robotic. AI tools will even let you feed in your own writing so it can mimic “your voice.” To an extent, that works. In the end, however, it’s distinctly not human. AI may spit out the sheet music, but you’re the person who’ll be on stage singing.

4.     AI doesn’t understand keywords. AI can generate an article just like this one giving you all sorts of tips about how to use AI, but it doesn’t necessarily understand the reasoning why. For example, you can specify AI to include certain keywords in your resume that will catch the reader’s attention, but it doesn’t really know why so it can’t effectively apply them. It may or may not guess well. It requires a human touch.


Philip Roufail contributed to this article.

Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, career coaching services, and outplacement services. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercs.com.