Salma Abdusamad
Organizational Communication
Dr. Noyes
8 March 2021
Investigating the E-Scene Activity
LinkedIn is a free social networking site meant to help career professionals connect in
order to strengthen ties with different companies, enable users to find employment opportunities,
and stay in touch with other individuals in similar fields of work. It works differently than other
social media sites such as Snapchat, Facebook or Instagram, as it utilizes a more calculated
approach when connecting its users with one another and is focused primarily on career-building
and business. Users are able to provide an overview about their career, list past work experiences
and education, and essentially advertise themselves to different companies. When a user inputs
his or her qualifications and experience, he or she is then offered a means of connecting people
with others in the same or similar professional field and background. It allows individuals to
learn about job opportunities, recruiters to find appropriate candidates for open positions and
allows for the sharing of relevant news articles to keep people in the loop. It also enables users to
see who has viewed their profile, offer recommendations, and save up to three searches made.
Once a user reaches 500 connections, LinkedIn will stop showing the number as it becomes more
focused on the quality aspect of those connections.
It is important to note that LinkedIn is a major social networking site, and as such as
hundreds of millions of users that frequent it. Professionals and industries around the globe use
the site in order to promote their organizations and recruit others. Many Fortune 500 executives
utilize the site, which goes to show how effective of a tool it has become in the modern age.
LinkedIn was launched in 2003 by Reid Hoffman and Allen Blue, the former a venture
capitalist and the latter the product designer, as well as engineers Konstantin Guericke and Eric
Ly. The site saw slow growth until it allowed companies to post job listings and search for new,
prospective employees. It eventually began to profit once it started allowing these companies to
advertise on the website. The company saw increasing profits each year, and was eventually
acquired by Microsoft in 2016 (Gregersen, 2020).
It appears to be heavily dependent on an individual’s line of work, but the schematics are
the same. Organizations are promoting themselves on their main pages by posting published
articles, company updates and other forms of news that some people opt to either like or share.
Once an individual clicks on a particular company, they can see its associated members and their
roles in the organization. It shows the number of followers a particular organization has, which
allows a person to gauge their size. There also seems to be a means for people to see the
individuals that work for a particular organization, their backgrounds, and a way of getting in
touch with its inclusion of a chat box. People who are employed by organizations to recruit to
prospective candidates about job opportunities can directly contact them to seek interest and
schedule them for interviews. People can follow the careers of their friends and colleagues, as
well—all goes to show how much the site values the importance of connections.
The “About” tab at the bottom of site reveals that LinkedIn is active in over 200 countries
with 720 million users. Just underneath the “About” tab is the “Community Guidelines” tab that
encourages people to read LinkedIn’s professional community policies. The three main policies
are: be safe, be trustworthy and be professional—the site elaborates on the last one to ensure
users are keeping their content “professionally relevant.”
An opportunity would be the inclusion of a chat box provides a direct means of speaking
to more individuals who perhaps have experienced ageism in the workplace, or at least their
observations of its past or current occurrences. A challenge would be not getting a response back
as it may not appear relevant to another person’s interest. Currently, I am a complete participant
in this community. As a result, roles available to me I have easier access to participants—
especially the ones who are familiar with me. It makes the chances of an actor responding to me
higher, however that may not be the case of every potential participant I may come across.
Part II:
As mentioned before, LinkedIn is heavily geared towards business and career building. It
is a resource for both professionals and industries alike to find jobs and acquire talent. Many of
the advertisements featured on the site are related as a result. One advertisement that was
presented when I opened the site was directly from LinkedIn instead of a random company,
promoting the site’s easy access to job listings. This ties in with the main message LinkedIn
wishes to emphasize to its users. With its promotion of connectivity and professionalism, the
type of content posted by its users is reflected. Users that utilize LinkedIn do not post images of
their Sunday night dinners or any other type of recreational activity. Instead, posts are related to
business and other career paths, articles that are posted are politically relevant to the nature of
business, and the minimalistic design of the platform adds to this atmosphere.
References
Gregersen, E. (2020, November 19). LinkedIn. Britannica.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/LinkedIn.
