The other day I posted a note on LinkedIn offering to connect job seekers with some of the temp agencies I work with. Mostly this was meant for the hundreds of Amazon employees recently laid off. A woman I’ll call Nadya responded. She was not part of the Amazon job-apocalypse, but she was looking for something new.
I asked for a short elevator pitch I could pass along. She sent this:
Senior product manager. Eight years building data-intensive platforms across reinsurance, hardware engineering, automotive, and consumer electronics. Former data engineer. MBA from NYU Stern. Built multiple GenAI demos at HP using RAG, LLMs, multi-step agents. Led a scientific data platform at Simr. Architected a 0→1 analytics platform for Marsh McLennan with 80% adoption, reducing manual work from weeks to hours.
I stared at this thinking: How on earth is this person out of work? Jobs should be sending her their résumés.
That’s when it hit me with unpleasant clarity: Nadya is no outlier. The job market is broken at the structural level.
And the data backs this up. October job cuts hit a 22-year high. More than 153,000 US jobs were eliminated in one month. Nearly 1.1 million layoffs this year.
According to a recent analysis by Goldman Sachs, Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) alerts, which employers must issue before conducting mass layoffs, have ticked up in recent weeks. Outside of the initial spike that occurred during the pandemic, the bank said these are now at their highest level since 2016.
The causes are familiar: AI adoption, cost cutting, soft demand. But the fallout is everywhere: résumés vanishing into filters; recruiters ghosting applicants; interviews evaporating; people building bots to apply to jobs posted by other bots.
Even job satisfaction numbers — superficially decent — collapse under scrutiny. Barely a third of workers feel fairly paid. Burnout, overload, and the erosion of boundaries are climbing across all white-collar sectors.
I can’t fix the job market. But I can diagnose the absurdity.
Which brings us to LinkedIn — the world’s premier job board that long ago stopped functioning as one.
The LinkedIn Parody That Isn’t a Parody
Anyone who has used LinkedIn recently will recognize this tone:
BREAKING: Man Finds Job on LinkedIn, Scientists Rush to Contain Event
A fictional headline, but barely.
In a development that has stunned economists, recruiters, and several LinkedIn influencers with ring lights, a 38-year-old man reportedly found a real job using LinkedIn. The event, described by experts as “statistically impossible,” has triggered an emergency summit of labor scientists and algorithmic ethicists.
“We thought it was a hoax,” said Dr. Lena Moritz, lead researcher at the Institute for Digital Labor. “But then we saw the timestamp, the recruiter’s message, and – God help us – the offer letter. He got hired.”
The man, whose name has been withheld to protect him from inbound pitch decks, had reportedly been applying to jobs for 14 months, receiving more than 900 automated rejections, 14 ghosted interviews, and one unsolicited invitation to join a startup selling AI-powered gratitude journals.
Sources say the actual job offer came after he commented “interesting take” on a post about workplace empathy, which triggered a recruiter’s algorithm to flag him as “emotionally available.”
“We’re studying his profile now,” said Moritz. “It’s a mix of vague optimism, strategic endorsements, and just enough self-deprecation to bypass the hustle filter.”
LinkedIn has issued a statement calling the incident “anomalous but inspiring,” and has promised to investigate whether the platform’s job-matching algorithm accidentally functioned as intended.
“We know our site was originally designed as a job board,” the statement said. “But that was a long time ago. Today it’s more of an experiment in human endurance. How much rejection can people take? Answer: A surprising amount.”
Meanwhile, the man has been placed in a controlled environment with limited access to motivational content. Scientists hope to learn whether the job offer will survive onboarding, or if it will dissolve into a freelance contract with no benefits.
LinkedIn used to be a job board. Now it’s an endurance experiment. A vibe marketplace. An algorithmic bazaar of toxic optimism.
And while the comedy is easy, the underlying reality is not: To be heard at all, job seekers are forced into performative absurdity.
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