Job’s a good’un: how LinkedIn transformed itself into a gen Z-friendly social media contender

If you heard that there's a social network attracting 200 new users every minute, has its users making 9,000 new connections, and which says that the often hard-to-reach gen Zers make up a growing fraction of that new activity, you would probably think it must be Snapchat, TikTok, or some new social network that you have never heard of - but you would be wrong.

One further official company statistic would make the answer glaringly obvious: the site also handles 4,500 job adverts every minute, and claims that six people actually get a new job each minute too. With that detail, it could only be LinkedIn - the social media network many of us tend to forget exists.

LinkedIn can be accused of many things, but being cool is rarely one of them. As a social network centred on work - and owned by Microsoft, still a hugely successful tech company but seen as something of a 90s relic - it has a reputation for earnestness bordering on naff.

TikTok and Instagram dominate the cultural conversation, Facebook still has the largest user base and Twitter is the social network journalists spend far too much of their time on - leaving LinkedIn often unregarded.

The flipside of that, though, is that as we've had a backlash against big tech and the dangers of social media, LinkedIn has escaped the bad press almost entirely. We might worry about Mark Zuckerberg spying on us - to the point where he's not just a household name, but the butt of jokes in comedy sketches across the world - but most of the surveillance on LinkedIn is carried out by other users, whether it be for genuine work-related reasons or for nefarious purposes, such as learning about someone you've matched with on a dating app.

It helps that LinkedIn doesn't need to track your activity across its site, app and the web in the openly invasive way that Facebook does in order to monetise your activity on its network. Because it has a clear work focus, LinkedIn can make money directly from users allowing it to message strangers, and it can make still more money from recruiters, as it's by far the most obvious tech platform on which to advertise jobs.

But that need to appeal to gen Z - a group that we are told wants a very different relationship with the world of work - is persuading LinkedIn to retool its site, pivoting towards video and other new features to attract the younger demographic. Can the work-based social network have it all? Can it keep its old users while gaining new ones and continuing to avoid the backlash that's hit other networks?