You can now rat on people for lying on their LinkedIn page. Unfortunately, you still can’t report self-proclaimed ‘thought leaders’ for their cringey posts.
What happened: LinkedIn is rolling out a suite of new tools and features designed to crack down on users who fake their identities, work history, or education on their profiles. One of the new features will allow other users to vouch for their former colleagues and classmates.
Vouching for another user is not an endorsement of their performance (you could still think they were terrible at their job), but rather an acknowledgment that they were at the same company as you at the same time.
Another new feature will allow companies to flag any accounts that falsely claim employment, removing their profiles from appearing on the employer’s official page.
Why it’s happening: Lying or embellishing on your resume is nothing new, but AI has made it a lot easier to make those lies more convincing — whether that’s creating a digital paper trail for a job you never had or generating an entirely fake profile. According to one analysis, a quarter of job candidate profiles are expected to be fake by 2028.
Recently, a group of North Korean IT workers built fake U.S.-based LinkedIn profiles and managed to land jobs at Fortune 500 companies, funnelling hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation a year to Pyongyang’s military programs.
Why it matters: AI tools have already enabled job hunters to send off hundreds of polished applications every day, overwhelming hiring managers in a sea of CV slop. Throw in the added challenge of well-disguised fake profiles, and it’s never been harder for companies to differentiate strong candidates from scammers (or foreign operatives, apparently).—LA
