Linking Out
A bot to create the ultimate algorithm-busting LinkedIn profile
Year: 2014
My mum brought me up to think that only idiots talk about themselves. The digital world - as a static representation of ourselves - relies on turgid self-promotion, urging us to trumpet every half-success from the rafters and dress up meh as amazeballs. While we market ourselves to others, of course, we market the media platforms that service us too.
Traditionally, there has only been one document in which this type of lying was the norm - the CV. All honest folk could live with that, however, because we only need to look at them once every few years at most. However, with the advent of social media, lying - aka making yourself look good - became the norm. It reaches its apex on LinkedIn, the place where people lie to make money.
As a paradigm of dystopia, LinkedIn is hard to beat. It makes money through its jobs board, which targets you based on your CV, after which recruiters are free to spam you all day long, as long as they pay LinkedIn of course.
And so I wrote a little bot to play around with the algorithm.
This is how it works: it scans the latest LinkedIn jobs board every months, and makes a random selection of jobs from different fields - advertising, farming, whatever. It then adds one of the jobs, including the description of my resume and an arbitrary start date, to my profile.
Although to anyone with half a brain it is obviously fake, a lot of lazy recruiters contact me.
Recruiters - this one’s for you.