A few years back I ended up back dating after a long marriage. ~50% of women I went on dates with checked my profile out beforehand. My significant other, whom I’ve been with >2y said she looked me up to verify everything I was saying was correct because far too many men she’d dated either outright fabricated their work life or they exaggerated it and it was an easy way to spot the red flags.
I never bothered to look online beforehand, but I definitely can see why many would; it’s scary out there.
It is only logical that prospective mates use LinkedIn as an informal "background check" because, 9 times out of 10, if you're in front of a real person who is a professional, they'll be on LinkedIn, and moreover, motivated to tell the truth about their career history and current activities. I myself have often used LinkedIn to find out information about people, especially those I've interacted with in their professional capacities.
That being said, would I, as a single guy, reach out to a woman on LinkedIn and try to date her? No way... and I've already seen complaints about this. Professional women probably get messages like this all the time, and it creeps them out, and they want it to stop. Nobody brings out their social lives to LI and nobody wants to mingle their dating/romance/sex lives and any drama into their professional life here. LI is a thriving networking resource, and anyone who values their career is going to keep it that way. And yeah, I've had "female" profiles reach out to me with vague motives, and I always block them, because they're 100% catfish, or scams, or foreigners of some kind.
So no, I don't envision LinkedIn becoming a viable "dating app", or replacing any social media for hooking up or meeting mates. If two professionals choose to use it that way, it's going to be quite discreet, and probably entirely via private messaging that they carry on at all. And yes, this blurring of the professional life with pleasure and after-hours is playing with fire.
Yet LinkedIn endures as a possibly reliable way to do your "background checks" on someone you hardly know. It's not a miraculous oracle, or the final word, but it's a good tool to carry in your toolbox.
Sure, it is useful to have in one's toolbox, but I wouldn't require it. If you pick the right few questions, and you have a generally good handle on the "right answers" and decent judgement, and assuming you aren't giving people a chance to look things up online or ask a chatbot, you can generally tell within a few minutes, usually at most ten, if someone is "for real". Sure, if you need to plow through hundreds or thousands of people, like job candidates for some job that a lot of people might fit, that isn't feasible, but a few or a couple dozen individuals?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 22.5 ms ] threadI never bothered to look online beforehand, but I definitely can see why many would; it’s scary out there.
That being said, would I, as a single guy, reach out to a woman on LinkedIn and try to date her? No way... and I've already seen complaints about this. Professional women probably get messages like this all the time, and it creeps them out, and they want it to stop. Nobody brings out their social lives to LI and nobody wants to mingle their dating/romance/sex lives and any drama into their professional life here. LI is a thriving networking resource, and anyone who values their career is going to keep it that way. And yeah, I've had "female" profiles reach out to me with vague motives, and I always block them, because they're 100% catfish, or scams, or foreigners of some kind.
So no, I don't envision LinkedIn becoming a viable "dating app", or replacing any social media for hooking up or meeting mates. If two professionals choose to use it that way, it's going to be quite discreet, and probably entirely via private messaging that they carry on at all. And yes, this blurring of the professional life with pleasure and after-hours is playing with fire.
Yet LinkedIn endures as a possibly reliable way to do your "background checks" on someone you hardly know. It's not a miraculous oracle, or the final word, but it's a good tool to carry in your toolbox.
“Sorry, I don’t connect on the 3rd date”
That’s (sadly) been happening since the beginning of time.