LinkedIn, a mass grave of ghost jobs, is now becoming a dating app

It is only logical that prospective mates use LinkedIn as an informal "background check" because, 9 times out of 10, if you're in front of a real person who is a professional, they'll be on LinkedIn, and moreover, motivated to tell the truth about their career history and current activities. I myself have often used LinkedIn to find out information about people, especially those I've interacted with in their professional capacities.

That being said, would I, as a single guy, reach out to a woman on LinkedIn and try to date her? No way... and I've already seen complaints about this. Professional women probably get messages like this all the time, and it creeps them out, and they want it to stop. Nobody brings out their social lives to LI and nobody wants to mingle their dating/romance/sex lives and any drama into their professional life here. LI is a thriving networking resource, and anyone who values their career is going to keep it that way. And yeah, I've had "female" profiles reach out to me with vague motives, and I always block them, because they're 100% catfish, or scams, or foreigners of some kind.

So no, I don't envision LinkedIn becoming a viable "dating app", or replacing any social media for hooking up or meeting mates. If two professionals choose to use it that way, it's going to be quite discreet, and probably entirely via private messaging that they carry on at all. And yes, this blurring of the professional life with pleasure and after-hours is playing with fire.

Yet LinkedIn endures as a possibly reliable way to do your "background checks" on someone you hardly know. It's not a miraculous oracle, or the final word, but it's a good tool to carry in your toolbox.