A photo of a man on one knee surrounded by roses, holding a ring. An update of a ravaged home following the California wildfires. A political meme for the left—and one for the right. A reflection on the past year. A layoff announcement.
While typical for social media sites, this rundown was not seen on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. It was seen—and is becoming the norm—on LinkedIn.
Over the last two-plus decades, the site once viewed as a place for recruiters and a landing page to make standard job announcements has morphed into a social media site for some, a skill-building site for others, and an emerging playground for artificial intelligence.
The Big Idea: With the future of TikTok in flux and pushback toward Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram, this could be LinkedIn’s moment to shine. But people think that moment is largely passing by—in part because LinkedIn can’t decide what it wants to be.
In the skills-based hiring world, LinkedIn has long been seen as a white whale. It has more than 1B users spanning 200 countries and both recruiting and learning platforms, along with experiments with AI-powered job matching. But as the skills-first movement has gained traction in governors’ offices and the C-suites of some of the country’s largest corporations, LinkedIn doesn’t seem to be pushing to be the dominant player.
Being the social media site for professionals is phenomenal, says Ian Davidson, chief growth officer at SmartResume. But the site’s purchase by Microsoft has muddled its value.
“It’s morphed into a place you can interact with people you know, but if it’s new people, there’s essentially a cost to doing so,” he says. “I think it’ll evolve but I don’t think they’re capitalizing on the moment.”
Microsoft’s Involvement
Microsoft first announced plans to buy LinkedIn in 2016 in an all-cash deal valued at $26.2B, breaking down to $196 per share and marking it as the largest acquisition in company history. Three years later, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said a key to its success was Microsoft essentially giving LinkedIn the space to flourish separately.
“Satya (Nadella, CEO of Microsoft) and the leadership team at Microsoft have been incredibly supportive of that framework,” Weiner said in a 2019 interview. “The philosophy has always been the more we grow LinkedIn, the better it benefits Microsoft, and so in that way, we are most definitely aligned.”
But fast forward nearly a decade after the initial deal closure and the two parties are seemingly more enmeshed than it may appear.
“Microsoft doesn’t just own LinkedIn; they control it,” says a former employee within the workforce development portfolio at LinkedIn, who asked to remain anonymous. “They control it in a way no one makes public. Budgets are set by Microsoft, not by LinkedIn. There’s a bunch of relationships that make it far tighter than it appears.”
Douglas Melsheimer, a then-partner at investment banking firm Bulger Partners, expressed a similar sentiment around the purchase.
“It’s very difficult to keep the cultures separate,” he told Bloomberg News in 2016. “I can’t think of an example of a large-scale acquisition like this where the acquired company really maintained any independence. Their fate is sealed, to a degree.”
However, some outside experts believe that sort of micromanagement is unlikely, because LinkedIn is just one of several entities Microsoft is juggling.
“I don’t think Microsoft plays a large day-to-day role,” says John Rich, founder of public relations firm A Rich Opinion. “When you consider all the business lines that generate more top-line revenue like Azure and 365, I’d be surprised.”
LinkedIn Learning’s Slipping Potential
Before the Microsoft deal, there was another mind-boggling LinkedIn acquisition: the purchase of edtech company Lynda in April 2015, reportedly valued at $1.5B, marking the tech giant’s foray into the ed-tech sector. Lynda became LinkedIn Learning, which touts over 24K courses. While LinkedIn declined to cite the total number of users for its learning arm, the company told Work Shift that roughly 138 minutes of learning content is consumed every minute on the platform.
But several industry experts believe the splashy deal has largely lost its luster, thanks to rising competitors, fuzzy credential ownership, and overall lack of focus.
Davidson lamented the fact LinkedIn Learning felt entirely separate from its parent company. “It doesn’t seem like LinkedIn Learning is integrated with the LinkedIn profile,” he said while navigating the Learning platform during our interview.
Trace Urdan, managing director at education consulting firm Tyton Partners, says that while the initial deal with Lynda and LinkedIn “electrified” the field of alternative credentials, now-LinkedIn Learning is simply a footnote in Microsoft’s lineup.
“It’s probably a rounding error for them,” Urdan says. “It doesn’t feel like it’s a meaningful part of their business, so it’s hard to think of them as a major learning competitor.”
Since the acquisition, other companies including Coursera and CodeAcademy have grown into online learning giants specializing in career-oriented credentials, while others like 2U have both risen and fallen in that time.
“They were one of a much smaller number of providers and that world has exploded,” Urdan says. “I don’t think it’s been a driver of their business, so—probably for all the right reasons—they haven’t emphasized it in the same way.”
Naomi Boyer, senior vice president of digital transformation for Education Design Lab, believes LinkedIn Learning made another misstep by not incorporating a learning employment record, otherwise known as LER, into its system.
“As talent marketplaces get built up around the wallets, LinkedIn will diminish some of its importance if it doesn’t figure out how to get involved in the wallet,” Boyer says. While LinkedIn has a badge system, it “will [only] allow you to connect to LinkedIn. It’s just a flat communication of what comes in; it’s not dynamic.”
When SmartResume’s Davidson left his role as vice president of business development at ZipRecruiter, he called some contacts at LinkedIn to pitch the idea of LERs. He said they told him it was a good idea, but it “will be a several years-long build.” This was in 2020.
“My read is [that] LinkedIn is not an effective job board; it’s not embracing LER,” he says. “If there were going to be opportunities past the four-year degree, LinkedIn is in the spot to make that happen … [but] I don’t see them capitalizing on the opportunities that are out there.”
LERs are particularly important as more emphasis is being placed on skills-based hiring. They also could play a critical role in tamping down on the flood of fake or AI-embellished job applications by creating a standardized tool for sharing verified skills and credentials.
A coalition of 12 major higher education associations just agreed to a set of core principles for LERs, with the ultimate goal of supporting skills-first hiring and boosting lifelong learning. And the U.S. Chamber Foundation is leading a bipartisan effort that would allow employers to contribute to a “skills savings account,” similar to an HSA, allowing users to spend toward skill development.
While LinkedIn Learning was initially touted to eventually give users new skills, which could then lead to new jobs, that skills-based assessment and development utopia has been largely untapped—not just by LinkedIn, but by the learning and corporate worlds alike.
“I don’t think we’ve achieved this end state of this kind of super-efficient ecosystem of skills-based hiring; it’s still elusive,” Urdan says, adding ideally a user would plug in their resume to LinkedIn, acquire skills to migrate to the job they want, and “the software would facilitate all of this.”
“But it’s not what happened, it’s not how it’s used,” he says. “Mostly because the end state of employers isn’t operating that way.”
The issue, in part, according to Boyer, is not a lack of interest, but a lack of connecting the dots between employers, employees, and tech conglomerates to provide the infrastructure. LinkedIn could step in to fill that gap if it is willing to let down some of the walls surrounding its black box of proprietary information.
“There is value in LinkedIn. But if it remains as a closed box to protect proprietary information and doesn’t change in how it interacts with others, it will diminish,” she says.
“They’re at a precipice of figuring out how to leverage some of the great things they have into the future with skills-based efforts … “[and] there is so much data in LinkedIn; we could do some analysis with employers and skills and we can propel them forward. I just don’t think they’ve been at the table for that.”
LinkedIn officials disagree, believing through their foray into artificial intelligence “we’re able to help hirers find people based on their skills, as opposed to traditional proxies like where someone worked or went to school,” a spokesperson said in an email to Work Shift.
The Next Frontier
LinkedIn has used AI capabilities—on the back end at least—for years, perhaps best known for its ability to recommend jobs or potential connections. The company’s commitment to AI could be in part buoyed by its relationship with Microsoft, which itself has had a long history and partnership with OpenAI, the behemoth behind ChatGPT.
And LinkedIn’s AI usage has ramped up in the last six months, as everyone is scrambling to adapt to AI on every level.
“Professionals across industries are seeing AI-powered technology play a bigger role in their day-to-day work. It’s an exciting moment of change,” a LinkedIn spokesperson says. “These new technologies create an incredible opportunity to use these tools to work for us, so we can get more done and feel more fulfilled in our daily tasks.”
At the start of this year, the company rolled out a “job match” feature showing candidates a percentage of how well-matched they were for potential job openings. In early February the company began testing AI tools to aid in job searches. There is also an AI assistant specifically for small businesses to find qualified candidates. That follows the company’s October 2024 rollout of AI hiring agents, intended to help recruiters with everything from job descriptions to sourcing candidates.
“Ultimately, if you’re searching for a job or looking to hire the right talent, you want the same thing—find a match as quickly as possible,” LinkedIn’s spokesperson says. “And that’s something AI is making easier for us to do.”
Using AI in hiring has gotten pushback. Several lawsuits against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, have challenged its alleged use of discriminatory job ad targeting tools. A similar lawsuit is ongoing against Workday, which marries HR and finance on an AI platform. And groups like the American Civil Liberties Union are deeply concerned about what they see as the technology’s propensity to bake in bias.
“Companies should avoid AI or other automated tools that carry a high risk of discrimination based on disabilities, race, and other protected characteristics,” says Olga Akselrod, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU.
If companies do use such tools, she says, they need to deploy third-party auditing systems that monitor for discrimination. And platforms like LinkedIn should conspicuously disclose to users how AI is being used, she says.
LinkedIn pointed toward its “responsible AI principles.” “We continuously work to ensure our systems can detect and eliminate any unintentional biases,” a company spokesperson said.
As the push-and-pull between the ethics of AI continues, the usage of AI is also ramping up on the consumer side. It creates what many call an “AI arms race” of sorts that leaves employers sifting through hundreds of AI-submitted applications, and, in turn, uses its own AI systems to weed out prospective employees.
That arms race could make verified credentials more important than ever.
“Instead of 200 resumes for a job posting where maybe 50 align, you’ll get 200 of 200,” Boyer says. “Getting down to verified credentials becomes really important—it’s who really has the skills.”
LinkedIn could still be an influential platform for verifying and sharing such credentials. But only if it wants to be.