In a 2023 Pew survey 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 Even relatively innocuous virtual deceptions – such as outdated or ultraflattering photos of themselves that misrepresent how they look in person or fudged facts about their interests and accomplishments – can be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-application fatigue as they search for ways to take back some control of their romantic fate.

LinkedIn’s interest as a dating internet site, according to people who make use of it this way, is the platform’s ability to surrender a number of one to control and you will improve the caliber of their applicants. Once the professional-networking site asks pages in order to relationship to the newest and you will former employers’ character users, it’s an extra covering from trustworthiness that other societal-media networks run out of. Of several profiles additionally include first-person sources regarding previous acquaintances and professionals – real people who have actual reputation users.

Even for people that bashful away from using LinkedIn to help you position to have dates, your website might a go-in order to product having vetting personal candidates found using traditional matchmaking apps or perhaps in-person experience

Some users have taken this idea to the extreme. Last summer, a British expat in Singapore, Candice Gallagher, made waves after posting good TikTok films 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 one larger relationships software,” John told me. “Any sort of social media where you can pick man’s photos is capable of turning into an internet dating software. And you may LinkedIn is much better because it’s besides proving people’s phony lives.”

A matter of consent

Charlotte Warren, a 30-year-old content creator who lives in Austin, sees things differently. Warren posts TikTok films throughout the relationship and has received more than her fair share of advances from unknown men on LinkedIn. Though she said scandinavian women wanting to marry american men that the men were usually 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.

“Everyone uses LinkedIn differently, but I do believe usually, anyone find it fairly intrusive and you will inappropriate” for people to use it in order to look for close people, Warren told me.