Member-only story

Dear HR People, Please Get Your LinkedIn Act Together

Three mistakes that will scare away potential high-quality employees.

Thomas Baumgartner
4 min readMay 1, 2022
Image by Tumisu (Pixabay).

I’ve been on LinkedIn for a couple of years now. A while ago, I was actively looking for a job, and thought LinkedIn might be a good starting point for that. Today I’m quite happy with the job I’ve got (didn’t find it on LinkedIn, though) and use the platform primarily to stay in touch with (former) colleagues and to promote their work. Occasionally I get approached by HR people looking for employees, primarily for companies in the tech sector (I have a data-related job and a background in academic research).

In their messages as well as in job ads I saw on LinkedIn, I found a couple of things that made me cringe. If you work in HR, please do your company and the potential job applicants a favor and avoid the mistakes described below. And if you’re not an HR person but looking for a job on LinkedIn, see these mistakes as warning signs and maybe think twice if you really want to work for a company who exhibits this kind of behavior.

Carelessly copying stuff from somewhere else into job ads

I’ve seen job ads containing bullet point lists where clearly some items got lost during copy-pasting.

The author made this story available to Medium members only.
If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

Or, continue in mobile web

Already have an account? Sign in

Thomas Baumgartner
Thomas Baumgartner

Written by Thomas Baumgartner

Physicist (PhD), engineer, software developer, data manager / analysist, photographer, musician, and (as of late) writer. Lives in Vienna, Austria.

No responses yet

Write a response