I think the dynamic you're observing is partly people just reacting to stuff (or if posting actively, fluffing up their "professional presence") as they do a job hunt.
Yes, but many of the people who matter in professional domains do. Much like all social media, the prolific few who do post have outsized influence, and engaging with them can often be to your benefit.
How? Legitimate question.
About a year ago I had a friend recommend me to their management. After three rounds of interviews, the CEO overrode the process and rejected me because I didn't have enough on my LinkedIn profile.
As far as I'm concerned, I dodged a bullet. If the CEO cares so much about LinkedIn filler that he'd overrule the hiring process, I'm certain I would have hated every moment working there.
One manager no-hires you because you don't post enough. Another doesn't like what you post. A third thinks you post too much. A fourth is pleased you seem to pay more attention to shipping products than hot takes. A fifth loves your hot takes.
So you get a call and are asked to do a coding thing. One person no-hires you because you wrote fizz-buzz by hand and didn't use Claude. Another wants to see that you know how to code by hand, but although your solution is fast, compact, and correct, it isn't the solution they had in mind.
At the end of the day, it's a highly inefficient, mostly irrational process dominated by social factors rather than objective feature detection.
Even if we could quantize someone into a feature matrix, every hiring process demands unique matrixes.
Even if I pass all the quantifiable stuff… the first answer to an HR “off limits” question will be given soon enough if I get the job.
Turns out being a Jesus nerd was a secret requirement.
Wish they could just put that in the job requirements.
Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act, in making religious hiring discrimination illegal, sometimes just drives it underground. Over the years it's done more good than harm, but at a certain point it may be time to let those who want to hire only Jesus nerds self-select.
I read somewhere that in Norway (small sample, yes I know) LinkedIn is supposedly a more popular social network than X/Twitter.
You can have whatever opinion you mean about Elon, X, free speech and whatever. I'm not here to have that discussion.
All that considered, as a Norwegian this had me quite surprised. I don't have the source anymore, but I'd love to dig into it to see what sort of metrics they use to measure this sort of popularity.
Literally nobody I know uses LinkedIn except for business-SPAM.
EDIT: Data from 2023: https://medias.smart-home-fox.de/SDE/Social%20Media%20Statis...
Definitely outnumbered by the inspirational slop, but I think it is a real mix and really depends who you connect with.
Anyway yeah the main point of LinkedIn is to get jobs. I've got several through recruiter spam.