LinkedIn unemployment streak

LinkedIn is a wild place. You have people shilling their products, marketing gurus talking about the similarities between proposing to their fiance and selling b2b SaaS, and a lot of other generally deranged things. For someone who isn’t terminally online, LinkedIn is just a resume app that you have to use when you don’t have a job.

For those who have been following more closely, you may have seen that LinkedIn recently rolled out a TikTok-style feed of content and a gaming experience similar to the New York Times. I’m trying to imagine a situation where I want to play games on LinkedIn, but then again, nothing makes sense anymore.

All of this, plus some more recent layoff news in my network got me thinking about how LinkedIn might gamify their app experience. What if there was an unemployment streak in the app? You could see how many days you’ve gone without work similar to Duolingo.

This implementation would be soul-crushing for people who have been stuck on the market for a long time, but it does make me wonder what good could be done if the above design as inverted to incentivize people to keep up a streak of say, submitting applications. It’d be a pretty big pivot from how LinkedIn functions today, so I doubt we’ll see anything like this soon.

Have a friend who’s between jobs? Don’t send them this newsletter. https://sorens.beehiiv.com/