But it's a core facet of their business model. Their secret sauce, as it were.<p>That is to say: the intrinsic feature set is of course based on self-promotion; at the same time, nearly everyone on LinkedIn (by virtue of the fact that they have time to tend to their profile, beyond a perfunctory business card level) knows, on some level, that they aren't that special. Plus they know that their profile can be looked at any minute, by anyone, from friends to past colleagues to prospective future ones, to crushes and exes to your old friggen higs school crew, for heaven's sake.<p>So they're always looking over their shoulder, and on some level, fearing their own shadow. The only thing that (momentarily) lifts this veil of gloom (at feeling fundamentally unworthy and illegitimate) is of course more positive attention, or at least the feeling that their profile is slightly less boring than those of their peers.<p>So they're they go, sprucing their chronology, finding a better headshot or background image... while everyone else is doing the same. Which leads to more gloom, and more insecurity. All as a proxy, a stand-in for building meaningful professional relationships and improving one's actual skill set -- that is to say, one's intrinsic relationship and career capital (to use a catchphrase of this cottage industry).<p>Meanwhile, an entire generation has grown up believing axiomatically that a strong LinkedIn profile is absolutely essential to your job search, because how else are recruiters going to know anything about you? And you have to put up a headshot because otherwise you must have something to hide.<p>Thus the cycle of perpetual inadequacy goes on and on, like an Escher staircase.