Is LinkedIn Failing its Gen Z Audience?

Oct 23

New Research by Bixa and B2Linked Shows Young Job-seekers Aren’t Using LinkedIn—and Why
By Sarah Weise & AJ Wilcox

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If you’re reading this article on LinkedIn, you’re likely over 25.

Right now, Gen Z is the largest living generation, representing nearly 2 of every 5 American consumers. This year alone, millions of early 20-somethings will seek to enter the workforce: well-educated, hard-working job seekers who are tech-savvy and highly accustomed to online communities and social media... and yet they’re not using LinkedIn.

Just eight months ago, this older Gen Z cohort was poised to start job-hunting during one of the longest economic expansions in U.S. history with record-low unemployment.

Today, it feels hopeless. 22-year-old Stephanie of Baltimore, MD called her job hunt, “The most exhausting and frustrating thing I’ve ever had to do.” She explains, “I know I’m strong candidate. But the uncertainty makes it overwhelming. How long can this continue for?”

Many older Gen Z’s 18-24 in age have moved back in with their parents to celebrate virtual graduations and help their families during this pandemic… all while frantically searching for entry-level positions they will likely not get.

Stephanie has been applying to entry-level marketing positions for months. She graduated from a strong state university with nearly a 4.0 GPA in her desired field. She’d had summer internships with top-name companies. But when COVID essentially slammed the economy to a screeching halt in March, she had to wait months for job openings to reappear. Even when they did, she could no longer compete because these entry-level jobs—typically designed for recent grads—were being filled by candidates highly over-qualified.

Generation Z is the largest living generation today. They are the most educated, most digitally-connected group we’ve seen enter the job market to-date. They have been desperately looking everywhere for jobs.

Everywhere, that is, except LinkedIn.

Key Takeaways of the Study

Over the course of a 10-month study, Bixa and B2Linked conducted qualitative interviews with nearly 150 young adults ages 19-24 across the country about their LinkedIn usage.

What we found is that while this is massive group with never-before-seen influence and purchase power, for the most part, THEY ARE NOT USING LINKEDIN.

With over 706 million professionals on its platform, LinkedIn processes over 55 job applications each second. According to LinkedIn’s own About Page, there are over 20 million open jobs on LinkedIn Jobs right now. Professionals who spend time here are finding jobs, generating leads, selling business, recruiting the right people, making valuable professional connections, and consuming and sharing valuable industry content.

Here are the highlights from the study:

Over 50% of young adults in the US age 19-24 have a LinkedIn account, yet 96% of this group rarely or never uses it.
Those who have accounts were asked (and often required) to create an account either by a well-intentioned parent or their university as a part of a career class or by a Career Services department.
LinkedIn makes inexperienced job-hunters feel overwhelmed and inadequate.
When young 20-somethings do use LinkedIn, they use it only to look for jobs. With surgical precision, they get in and get out as quickly as possible. They do not browse the news feed. They do not connect with others. It is purely transactional.
They don’t see a difference between LinkedIn and any other job board like Indeed.
They do not think of LinkedIn as “social media”

With these key findings, we have to wonder:

Is LinkedIn failing today’s youth?
What could LinkedIn do to fix this?

The entry of Gen Z to the workplace marks a gargantuan opportunity for LinkedIn right now. And it’s a great opportunity for Gen Z as well, if it worked for them.

How The Study Started...

This article has been a long time coming.

In March of 2019, I published a book for business leaders and marketers called InstaBrain: The New Rules for Marketing to Generation Z (psst… check it out on Amazon or get your free chapter here #shamelessplug).

Immediately, I started getting DMs on Instagram and emails from readers asking, “Why didn’t you talk about LinkedIn?” (ironically, I’ve never gotten this question ON LinkedIn).

The answer was a tough one: LinkedIn wasn’t discussed in the book because in nearly two years of research with a Gen Z demographic, the topic of LinkedIn rarely came up.

So I called my friend AJ Wilcox who runs an impressive LinkedIn ad agency out of Salt Lake City, B2Linked. AJ and I met 5 years ago when we were both speaking at a digital marketing conference. Our relationship began with a heckler in the audience and was solidified by some well-timed karaoke. And yes, that just about sums up every marketing conference, ever. 😂

When AJ, whom I consider to be an expert in all things LinkedIn, didn’t know why youth was not on LinkedIn, I knew we were in trouble. So a month later when I was in Utah keynoting a conference, we joined forces to start digging into it. We walked around a college campus and spoke to every young person we could find. And you know what? Even with simple intercept interviews like this, common themes began to emerge.

Over the next 6 months, we conducted in-depth interviews with over 100 young adults across the country ages 19-24 about their LinkedIn usage.

AJ and I are both active on LinkedIn and even instructors with LinkedIn Learning (if you’re so inclined… check out our courses on LinkedIn Ads, Market Research, Storytelling, and Generational Design).
We firmly believe in LinkedIn and all the connections it facilitates. As you can imagine, coming from this world of LinkedIn, you can imagine our surprise at these findings.

So let’s dig in...

Critical Finding: LinkedIn Makes Young Job-Seekers Feel Inadequate, Insecure, Overwhelmed

To me, this might be the most critical finding of our research, because if LinkedIn can’t do something about how its job search platform makes its users feel at a critical point in their careers in one of the worst job markets in recent history, the brand will never be able to convince them to try out any other features.

Imagine this. You’re a Gen Z youth in college and looking for your first job. You sign into LinkedIn, and you immediately see robust profiles of highly experienced individuals: thought leaders, authors, speakers. You turn to your own profile, and stare blankly. How do you describe that summer you were a camp counselor? The babysitting you did for your neighbor’s kid? Those few months you spent restocking shelves at a retail store? That internship where your most valuable contribution was a daily coffee run? That Fiverr gig where you popped up websites for a few bucks?

While many in this generation have side hustles, they don’t feel like they can feature these on LinkedIn either. They might feel great making an extra $500/mo from re-selling thrift store clothes on Instagram, but they feel silly about posting that as “professional” experience. This generation is serious about career advancement and discerning curators of content on their social accounts. They don’t always want to showcase a job that does not align with their ideal path.

Both AJ and I have had conversations with our contacts at LinkedIn since this research. LinkedIn’s response to Gen Z’s feelings of inadequacy was (ironically) inadequate.

LinkedIn reps described how they are designing a way to post gig-economy style jobs on profiles. While this might be a step in the right direction, I certainly would not consider a summer internship or occasional babysitting a gig-economy job.

Even if this worked and Gen Z job-seekers felt comfortable showcasing their past experience, the point remains that their past experience is so little compared to other people they’re seeing on LinkedIn that they feel that it’s almost inconsequential.

What LinkedIn Could Be Doing

Research for the sake of research is the worst, don’t you agree? As a researcher who has built a business around being hired by companies to understand customer segments and recommend better product and marketing strategies, I think so too. What a waste of my time if no one applies our data! That’s one of the reasons all of Bixa’s deliverables come with push-and-play recommendations. And that’s why, right here, we’re going to detail a few opportunities (@LinkedIn, you’re welcome!)

#1 Convince Young Job-Seekers Their Past Experience Matters

Generation Z is a group of specific and discerning content curators. This is one of the reasons they have multiple Instagram accounts. It’s not because some are fake and some are real (“Finsta” truly is a misnomer). They have multiple accounts to represent (and curate) content for interests, hobbies, or slices of their personality.

This is one of the reasons they struggle to put a resume together. Because an assortment of short-term jobs does not fit into the story or persona they’re painting for themselves in their professional resume, they would almost rather not include them.

As any good hiring manager knows, however, each past experience teaches us something about ourselves and the way we work. LinkedIn could create a strategy to communicate to young people that even if your first job doesn’t match your ideal path, it likely taught you skills like listening and teamwork in a professional setting, soft skills that can often be lacking in today’s young people. These past jobs matter, and should be featured on a job profile.

#2 Establish College Partnerships

Only half of today’s college students are on LinkedIn, and far less spend any real time on the platform. The majority of young people with a LinkedIn account created one because they were asked or required to by their college or university. For many students, this assignment is the first time they’ve even considered using LinkedIn.

Given that this technique is actually working to drive account creation, we would suggest that LinkedIn double down on it and create formal partnerships with colleges and universities, giving them the tools and key areas of emphasis needed so that they have a formal process to show students how to use LinkedIn in the most effective way possible after account creation.

From our conversations students, the only thing they get instruction in currently is how to create a profile and search for jobs. They are not given instructions (and especially not plug-and-play templates) to:

Connect with and start relationships with hiring managers
Frame their past experience to make it feel more meaningful (i.e., wording templates and examples)
Become an influencer on LinkedIn. Students have no idea that LinkedIn is one of the easiest platforms in the world to go viral on today. If they only knew this, they would be spending a whole lot less time on TikTok and a whole lot more on LinkedIn. The rest of the LinkedIn platform would also benefit from new perspectives on articles, ideas, and content from this younger crowd.

Career Services within colleges seek out resources to share with hungry students. LinkedIn could offer colleges career courses and curricula that include education about how LinkedIn can be leveraged (for free!) by college students. Plug-and-play slides provided by LinkedIn could be leveraged by Career Services staff.

#3 Create Videos, Not Text

Compared to older generations, Gen Z consumes content in an exceedingly visual manner. In fact, they spend an average of 3 hours a day watching videos!

Yet, all of LinkedIn’s resources for college students are written in text and (worse yet) handbooks. Let me ask you this: when’s the last time any teen you knew voluntarily read a downloaded book PDF?

If LinkedIn is really striving for content to be consumed by Gen Z, it needs to start creating content in formats that Gen Z actually consumes: visuals, infographics, templates, checklists, and (of course) videos.

LinkedIn Learning is a perfect resource for LinkedIn to leverage for this purpose. If I were LinkedIn, the first thing I would do is surface existing LinkedIn Learning courses on landing your first job on the homepage of students in this age bracket.

#4 Quick Wins for Students

Today’s youth consume content in a very different way from Millennials. Because they have been bombarded by visual inputs from the time they were very young, they are making snap judgments about what they’d like to spend their time on.

Once they have decided (very quickly) that they’d like to invest time in something, there must be a quick win they get right away to show them the value of using a new platform. If they do not see immediate value, they will never come back.

Providing a job search is not enough. They use job search tools already, so from their perspective, how is this different?

There are so many ways that LinkedIn could differentiate themselves for this group through personalized services specifically for students, online accountability groups for students designed to help each other find jobs, or so many other ideas.

Hey LinkedIn: Just putting it out there—I would not say no if you wanted to hire me and I’ll help you test about 10 different options to boost engagement with your Gen Z user base. (ha!)

I think the point here is that it doesn’t seem like LinkedIn has given this group of early 20-somethings looking for an entry-level job any real thought. Setting up a quick “for students” page with a few written articles is not at all what this generation needs from the platform.

#5 Internship Search

Since college students do often go to LinkedIn specifically to search for internships (both paid and unpaid), summer jobs, or part-time jobs, LinkedIn could create a special internship search experience with the filters that students care about. They’d have to test it, but this might do better as an area separate from their main job search.

Right now, most companies wanting to post internships have better luck on college websites directly than on LinkedIn.

This would be an easy win for both students and companies alike.

#6 Personalized, Relevant Emails

One thing that surprises most people about Generation Z is that they are still on email. Email marketing is one of the biggest opportunities for marketers looking to scale their Gen Z audience, and LinkedIn could absolutely create a nurture sequence that gives training and quick wins to those to identify themselves as students starting their career search.

#7 Change The Format of a Traditional Resume

Since this generation is so much more comfortable with video than with text, why not let them create video resumes that introduce themselves and say why they’d be a great asset to a company.

LinkedIn currently allows uploading media for each position, but it’s not clear what students could (or should) use this for. Give them examples in their profile editor of effective ways to use this media area to showcase their talents. Explain that this is a great way to beef up an otherwise-light profile or resume.

Add an option in the profile section to let videos to be a primary part of any experience listing, rather than just being a sidenote or support. Seeing videos of applicants would also help recruiters understand more about individuals they might want to hire, and start looking at people as whole individuals with a range of life experiences instead of just a few bullet points on a resume. Consider it a pre-interview!

#8 Better Plug-and-Play Connection Requests

Students naturally feel that they don’t have much to offer in connecting with others, so providing education and recommendations about wording connection requests would go a long way to helping them grow their nascent networks.

The standard “I’d like to invite you to join my network” is not a good option for students. Imagine a drop-down with a variety of options that they could select from and personalize.

Closing Thought

LinkedIn’s stated mission is to, “Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.” However, they have not done an adequate job of this for young people. To meet its mission, LinkedIn must create better ways to incorporate and engage youth on its platform.

Whoa… You made it to the end of this article? You must be over 30.