Employees on LinkedIn find themselves in a catch-22: They may cringe at self-promotion, carefully polished posts who fill their feeds but still believe they need to build their own personal brand.
Some companies even step in to post for them.
Corporate ghostwriting company Hat Tip creates LinkedIn posts for founders and, increasingly, their employees. Founder Christian Di Bratto calls it a sales and marketing strategy for a world in which brands may lose their appeal. He recently charged a client $8,400 a month to write LinkedIn posts for three employees, three times a week.
“People want to buy from people,” Di Bratto said. “This employee portion of it is the next evolution of what the founder-led content was.”
With the emergence of gravel slop and the migration away from X, LinkedIn is now a hybrid of performative professional messaging and personal sharing. Many employees consider posting there as one necessary career investmentmade easier by the rise of AI tools.
Even LinkedIn is reconsidering all these messages. In July, the company started letting users flag posts that looked “like AI slop.” Pangram, an AI detection company, estimated that 41% of long LinkedIn messages and 30% of shorter messages it analyzed between April and June probably AI generated. LinkedIn says the recent changes have reduced the amount of AI slop on the platform.
Why employees feel like they have to post so much on LinkedIn
When a former Microsoft executive was fired last year, he began posting regularly on LinkedIn about his field. After seeing recruiters and career coaches online stressing the importance of building a personal brand on the platform, it felt like something he couldn’t afford not to try.
“We all need to be content creators in addition to our current jobs – or lack of jobs – and perform as candidates,” he said.
It’s not alone struggling job seekers who have come to see posting regularly on LinkedIn as an important part of managing their careers.
Muskan Agarwal, based in India and leading Cherry Media, a marketing agency that helps professionals and creators grow their online presence, said she has seen a wave of tech workers looking to building personal brands on platforms such as LinkedIn.
Her clients include current and former American employees of companies such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google. Agarwal said some are not trying to become full-time creators, and their goals include landing better jobs, speaking opportunities or professional connections. Each client, she said, pays her agency for a minimum of three months of services.
Does posting on LinkedIn actually help your career?
The million dollar question for job seekers and employees alike is how much all that posting actually helps their careers. Matt Stabile, founder of recruitment agency Stabile Search, believes LinkedIn posts have shifted towards engagement-based content.
“The quality has shifted to ‘AI slop’ rather than meaningful discussions,” he said.
Stabile believes that posting and attracting engagement can increase one’s engagement visibility on LinkedIn and help them establish themselves as thought leaders, but posting too much could send the wrong message to recruiters.
“I would say that excessive posting would be a red flag. If you are busy, in demand and talented, why would you spend your time posting on LinkedIn?”
Jason Baxter, the owner and operator of a boutique marketing agency, posts once to twice a week and comments on posts at least ten times a week. He has obtained legitimate business and connections through the platform. Yet he thinks more than half of people on LinkedIn are just “yelling at the world and not reading what anyone else is saying.”
How to post without exaggerating
Jansel Murad, vice president at Dukas Linden Public Relations, a financial PR firm, generally recommends clients share one to two posts per week.
“If you don’t have anything authentic to say, hold back, it’s okay,” Murad said. “Because then you will probably get even more involvement from your network if they see that you really share updates that are important to you.”
And even if your authentic voice – that Murad said often seems to be a good place for the LinkedIn algorithm – wants to be there five times a week, she would still say she has to slow down her posting speed. Maybe bundle messages instead.
So in the end, the best practice might just be a balance – and sometimes cringe.
Benjamin Chipman, a 25-year-old marketer and content creator who likes to post on LinkedIn, is enthusiastic about the concept of a performative poster. Chipman found posting on the platform life-changing during college, and says LinkedIn has been responsible for most of his career trajectory.
“I don’t care if you post something on Instagram, on LinkedIn or on Facebook, there’s a performance element to it, but that doesn’t mean it’s inherently not productive,” Chipman said. “These two things can be true at the same time.”
