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When Networking Becomes Noise · Edan Haddock - Total Talent

• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to Eden Haddock Total Talent.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Eden Haddock, Head of Talent and People Experience at Movember.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: No guests, no sponsors, just one talent practitioner, still on the tools, talking about what I'm seeing in the world of talent, people, and work.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: And today is going to be a slightly shorter episode.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because I want to talk about something that, well, it probably doesn't require an hour of philosophy, right?
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: But it requires an intervention.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: The LinkedIn inbox.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because I truly feel that at some stage networking has started to become noise.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And mine is becoming completely unmanageable.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about potentially one hundred messages a day, depending on the day.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Candidate messages, sales messages, automated messages, connection requests followed immediately by sales messages.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: People wanting to show me a platform.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: People wanting fifteen minutes of my time.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: And increasingly, messages that are clearly AI generated, pretending not to be AI generated.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And somewhere buried underneath all of that are actual human beings I know.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: People I genuinely want to speak to.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: People reaching out with something thoughtful.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Candidates with legitimate questions.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: I value that.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: My friends in the industry, former colleagues, people wanting an actual conversation.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm starting to wonder whether LinkedIn has a pretty serious problem on its hands.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because the inbox was once one of the most valuable parts of LinkedIn.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: But now I think we're in a danger of turning it into email.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't mean good email.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean that personal email account you've had for 15 years that now has 38,000 unread messages in it.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: That email.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Not because you had their mobile number.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Not because somebody introduced you.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Not because you worked together.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Simply because you existed within the same professional community.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that was bloody brilliant, particularly in talent.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: LinkedIn fundamentally changed recruitment because suddenly recruiters could find and approach people directly.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: But it wasn't only recruitment.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: You could message someone whose work you admired.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: You could connect with somebody you met at an event.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: You could ask someone a question.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: You could congratulate someone on a new role.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: You could reconnect with an old colleague.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: There was friction, but it was good friction.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: You generally had to decide is this worth messaging someone about?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then something changed.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: We industrialized the message.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Automation arrived.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Sequences arrived.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Mass outreach arrived.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: AI arrived.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly the economics of sending a message completely changed.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: It costs almost nothing in time or effort to send five hundred messages.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Which creates a fascinating problem.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because when sending a message becomes incredibly cheap, receiving one becomes incredibly expensive.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's where we are.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: The attention tax, this is the bit I truly don't believe that we are talking enough about.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Every message somebody sends creates work for somebody else.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Even deleting it requires attention.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: I have to look at the notification.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: Open the message.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Work out who you are.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: Work out whether I know you.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Work out whether it's relevant.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Work out whether it needs a response.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then either respond, archive it, ignore it, or mentally promise myself I'll come back to it later.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Multiply that by potentially one hundred messages a day as I do receive.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: That is not communication anymore.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's administration.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the irony is that many of the tools creating this volume being sold as productivity tools.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: They're saving the sender time.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: Brilliant.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: But they're transferring the workload to the receiver.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: You saved yourself three minutes writing a thoughtful message.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: But you sent it to 500 people.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: So collectively, you've just created hours of work for everyone else.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's not necessarily productivity.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's outsourcing your attention cost.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: And when everyone does it, right, the system breaks.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: Let's move on.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: I just applied.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about candidates.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because this one is complicated for me.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to be really careful here.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: I understand why candidates message recruiters after applying completely.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: The job market is difficult.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: People want to stand out.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: And for years, we've told candidates to do exactly this.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: I know I have.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Don't just apply.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Find the recruiter.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Introduce yourself.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Show initiative.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Get yourself noticed.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't blame candidates for following the advice the industry has been giving them.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: But today, the problem is scale.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm recruiting for a role with hundreds of applicants, and a significant percentage of those people also message me, I've effectively created a second application channel.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: And most messages say some variation of, hi Eden, I've just applied for your role and thought I'd introduce myself.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And great, but what do I do with that?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Do I now assess your LinkedIn message?
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Does messaging me improve your chances?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Should somebody who doesn't message me be disadvantaged?
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely not.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if everybody follows the advice to message the recruiter, then messaging the recruiter no longer makes you stand out anyway.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: It becomes another cue.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: So perhaps we do need to change that advice.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Apply well.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: Make the application relevant.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Show me why this particular opportunity makes sense for you.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then trust the process.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: If you genuinely have a question that isn't answered in the advert, absolutely reach out.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: If there's context, I genuinely need to understand, reach out.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: But perhaps we need to stop telling candidates that simply announcing you've applied is some secret hack to getting noticed.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because when everybody uses the hack, it's not a hack.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's just more noise.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, sales outreach.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: It has a bigger problem.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is where things have really gone off the rails.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know the message.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Hey Eden.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Loved your recent post about talent.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well which one?
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: Hey Eden, I noticed the amazing work you're doing at November.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well what work specifically?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: This one.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: I work with forward thinking talent leaders like yourself.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Here we go.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Then comes the pitch.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes immediately.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes three messages later, because apparently we're pretending this is a friendship first.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: And AI has made this weird.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because personalization used to signal effort.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Someone mentioned your podcast, then they probably listened to it.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Someone referenced something specific that you said, they probably read it.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Someone understood what your organization was trying to achieve, then they probably did some research.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: But now I don't know.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: An AI tool can potentially analyze my profile, scan my content, and create something that looks incredibly personal in seconds.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Which means we're entering this bizarre world where personalization no longer necessarily means personal.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: That matters.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because trust online has always relied on little signals.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: An effort was one of those signals.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: And we're removing it.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the follow-up to the follow-up.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Can we establish some new etiquette around follow-ups?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Please.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: If somebody hasn't replied to your LinkedIn message within twenty-four hours, you probably don't need to follow up.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: And if they haven't replied to that one, sending another message saying just bumping this to the top of your inbox does not bump it to the top of my priorities.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it bumps it further down.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: People are busy.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Silence is sometimes an answer, not always.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Messages get missed.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: With my LinkedIn inbox, I miss messages constantly and I hate it.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: But there has to be a reasonable threshold where persistence becomes spam.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I think automation has distorted that threshold.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because the person sending the fourth follow up might not even know they're sending it.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: They're sitting in a sequence day one, day three, day seven, day fourteen.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Just circling back.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Wanted to make sure you saw this.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Thought I'd try one last time.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then somehow there is another last time next Tuesday.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: At some point, we've got to bring human judgment back into communication.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: So are we heading towards email?
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: This is the part that worries me.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Think about your personal email.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: These days, how many emails do you actually read?
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Not work emails, your personal inbox, I mean.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: Mine is essentially a dumping ground.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Retail promotions, newsletters I don't remember subscribing to discount codes, notifications, marketing, automated updates, things screaming, Eden, you don't want to miss this.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, actually, I apparently do.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because I've missed the seventy three emails you also sent me.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually, right, our behavior changes, right?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: You you stop checking.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: The signal to noise ratio gets so bad that you assume everything is noise.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: That is what I worry could happen to LinkedIn.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: Not that people will leave LinkedIn, that they will stop opening the inbox.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's arguably worse.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because the infrastructure still exists.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: The messaging feature still exists.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone can still technically contact everyone.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: But nobody is listening.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: The channel dies without actually disappearing.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: So the tragedy of it, I think this would genuinely be a shame.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because LinkedIn is supposed to be a professional community.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Community requires conversation.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: It requires connection.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: It requires discovery.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Some incredible opportunities have started with a LinkedIn message.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: Jobs, friendships, mentoring relationships, ideas, collaborations, conversations with people on the other side of the world you otherwise would have never met.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's the magic.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: And we're potentially destroying it through volume.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: There is a strange paradox here.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: We've never had more technology helping us communicate.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: But we're making it harder to actually communicate.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: We can generate more messages faster, more personalized, more targeted, more automated?
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the result could be that fewer messages actually get read.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's not progress, that's an arms race.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: Does LinkedIn need to intervene?
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: This brings me to LinkedIn itself.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: At what point does the platform have a responsibility to protect the inbox?
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because LinkedIn already understands that low quality content damages the feed experience.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: We can report spam, we can report content.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: We now can report AI slob.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: The platform has mechanisms designed to protect the quality of what we see.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: So why shouldn't that philosophy extend further into messaging?
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not talking about LinkedIn reading every private conversation and deciding whether it's interesting.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's obviously not what I want.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: But surely patterns matter.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: Identical messages being sent at enormous scale.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: Aggressive automated sequences.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: Accounts sending huge volumes with incredibly low response rates.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: Repeated unsolicited commercial outreach.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: Could the platform get smarter at identifying behavior that looks less like networking and more like spam?
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Email providers already do this.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: Gmail doesn't simply dump every message anyone sends you into one giant chronological list and wish you luck.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: There are layers of filtering, spam detection, promotions, prioritization.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe professional messaging needs to evolve in the same direction.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps there needs to be a genuine distinction between people and pitches.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because right now they're all competing for the same tiny piece of attention.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe AI should fix what AI helped create.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: AI might actually be part of the solution.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: AI has dramatically reduced the cost of producing outreach.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: So perhaps AI needs to dramatically reduce the cost of receiving it.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: So what is the new etiquette?
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we need some new rules.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: Not official LinkedIn rules, just human ones.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: Before sending someone a message, ask, does this message actually need to exist?
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a candidate, have a reason behind simply telling the recruiter you've applied.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: It needs to be beyond that.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: If you're selling something, tell me why you genuinely think it's relevant.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: Don't manufacture familiarity.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: Don't pretend you've been following my work if you haven't.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: Don't disguise a sales pitch's networking.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you've used AI to help write the message, fine.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: But make sure there is still a human thought behind while you're sending it.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps more importantly, respect silence.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: Not every unanswered message needs another message, then another, then another, then the breakup email.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: We're not dating.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: You wanted to sell me workforce software.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be okay.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: So is the LinkedIn inbox broken?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, maybe not yet.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: But mine is certainly starting to feel that way.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: And when you're potentially getting 100 messages in a day, something has changed.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to stop receiving LinkedIn messages.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's the point.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: I actually want the opposite.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: I want the LinkedIn inbox to become valuable again.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: I want to notice the interesting message.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: I want to see the candidate with a genuinely thoughtful question.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: I want to hear from the old colleague.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: I want the unexpected conversation.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: I want someone I've never met to be able to reach out with a brilliant idea.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's what LinkedIn should be.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: But if we keep flooding the channel because technology allows us to, eventually we'll stop listening.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: And once that happens, we've taken one of the most extraordinary professional networking tools ever created, ever created, and turned it into the promotions tab.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that would be a bloody shame.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Eden Haddock.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: This has been Eden Haddock Total Talent.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: No guests, no sponsors, just conversations about talent, people, and the future of work from someone still very much on the tools.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoyed this episode, please follow the show and share it with someone who has 100 unread email messages sitting in their inbox right now, like I do.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe don't send them a LinkedIn message to tell them you've shared it.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'll catch you next time.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: Cheers.