The Evil Genius of LinkedIn Ads (Part I)

(Because this definitely qualifies as it's own series....)

In an era of US History in which it has never been more difficult to find qualified applicants to fill ANY job, be it office manager, gas station convenience store attendant or Starbucks barista, LinkedIn pounds the audience with ads featuring hopeful, starry-eyed, out-of-work millennials trying to find ways to stand out from the crowd as they pursue their dreams of an entry-level salary at a mindless, fill-in-the-blank drone corporation.  All of their commercials feature the same people wearing very nice, expensive-looking clothing, getting themselves ready for their interviews in very large, upscale apartments or houses, and heading off hoping to be picked out from all of the hundreds or even thousands of like-minded, equally qualified go-getters who want nothing more than to put 150 percent effort in to achieving success for The Corporation.

This is a bizarre fantasy that pretends that we are still living in the pre-COVID world and not the one which gave us free money in the form of stimulus payments (whether we needed them or not) and birthed a new era of pro-Union and life-is-more-than-work-I-will-not-be-a-sucker-like-my-parents attitudes and, above all, an understanding that Your Dream Is Not My Dream If You Want Me To Work PAY ME that has shuffled the deck for the first time since the French Revolution.  But I'll expand on that in a future chapter.  For now, I'll just reiterate that as much as businesses would like to deny it, the unemployment rate is almost zero and there are no hungry masses yearning to be your wage serfs knocking each other over for an interview in your office, Sorry Not Sorry (as the cool kids say.)