In a 2023 Pew questionnaire of US adults, nearly one-third of respondents said they had used an online dating site or app at least once. More than half of women who had used the apps reported feeling overwhelmed by the number of messages they had received in the past year, while 64% of men said they felt insecure from the lack of messages they had gotten. Though an overwhelming majority of men and women said they’d felt excited about people they connected with, an even-larger proportion of respondents said they were sometimes or often disappointed by their matches.

Online, it isn’t always easy to know whether the human behind an alluring profile is who and what they say they are. Even relatively innocuous virtual deceptions – such as outdated or ultraflattering photos of themselves that misrepresent how they look in person or fudged facts about their interests and accomplishments – can be disheartening. Then there are the people who fabricate or steal their entire profile, a practice known as “catfishing,” leaving anyone getting hit up by a stranger online justifiably skeptical. All these deceptions have left many people with dating-app tiredness as they search for ways to take back some control of their romantic fate.

LinkedIn’s interest because the a dating internet site, considering those who put it to use in that way, ’s the platform’s power to give back several of one to control and you will enhance the quality of the candidates. As the professional-networking webpages asks pages so you’re able to link to the latest and previous employers’ profile profiles, it has got a supplementary level of trustworthiness one most other public-mass media networks lack. Of a lot users also include earliest-people recommendations out-of former acquaintances and you can executives – actual individuals with real profile users.

Even for people that timid away from using LinkedIn so you can angle to possess times, this site happens to be a chance-so you can device to possess vetting intimate applicants found as a result of antique matchmaking software or in-people knowledge

Some users have taken this idea to the extreme. Last summer, a British expat in Singapore, Candice Gallagher, made waves after send a good TikTok videos in which she said LinkedIn had “A-grade filters” for finding “A-grade men” – namely, doctors, lawyers, and “finance bros.” In the post, she touted the various filters you could use to track down ideal partners. More recently, a screenshot of the tech entrepreneur George Hotz’s LinkedIn bio was shared on X. In his bio, Hotz declared that he now used the site “exclusively as a dating platform” and laid out a catalog of requisite attributes – “intelligent, attractive, female, in or visiting San Diego” – for his ideal match. “Send me a message and invite me out for a drink,” he wrote.

“Social network is certainly one large relationship app,” John told me. “Any type of social network where you can see man’s images can change with the an online dating software. And you may LinkedIn is even better because it is besides demonstrating man’s bogus life.”

An issue of consent

Charlotte Warren, a 30-year-old content creator who lives in Austin, sees things differently. Warren posts TikTok video on matchmaking and has received more than her fair share of advances from unknown men on LinkedIn. Though she said that the men were usually polish women reaching out under some flimsy guise of professional networking or “mentorship,” many had bare-bones profile pages that suggested they weren’t seriously using the platform for work. Several of her friends and colleagues across genders have received similar messages, she said, and were similarly put off by them.

“Folk spends LinkedIn in a different way, however, I think generally speaking, some body find it fairly intrusive and poor” for people to use it in order to select personal people, Warren explained.