LinkedIn power users are trying to turn the site into a lucrative side hustle, and it's pissing everyone off

The post took off and has more than 940,000 views and almost 7,000 shares to date. Xie, encouraged by the response, continued posting a steady stream of work-related content, sharing jokes and career tips for junior lawyers. The focus proved popular, and Xie has amassed more than 400,000 followers on TikTok.

Stuck at home without coworkers to complain to in the office kitchen, many workers have flooded TikTok and LinkedIn to rant, sob, and gossip about their careers. The hashtag #careertiktok, where creators share salaries and day-in-the-life vlogs about their jobs, has more than 1.5 billion views, and, according to LinkedIn, more than 13 million LinkedIn users have their profile set to "creator mode" to get more visibility for their posts.

This new "online watercooler" marks a shift in how much people share about their jobs on the internet. Instead of curated posts about career milestones and successes, people have gotten more vulnerable, honest, and specific about their day-to-day work lives. Workers are highlighting once-taboo issues like pay transparency and discrimination, and some professionals like lawyers, entrepreneurs, and HR representatives have parlayed their posting into new careers and lucrative side hustles. But some workers have gotten into trouble for their social activity with either their employers or their audiences.

As Justin Welsh, a LinkedIn influencer focused on "solopreneurship," said: "You have to balance being interesting, unique, contrarian, challenging, polarizing, with being cognizant of how your message will be received in the market. That is a very, very difficult line to walk."

The Great Reshuffle

Early in the pandemic, people stuck working at home began flocking to social-media platforms. TikTok downloads exploded and niche communities formed within the app. Even traditionally staid platforms like LinkedIn saw an unprecedented outpouring of "vulnerable" posts about mental health, burnout, and stress.

Work drove a lot of that stress. Layoffs soared as businesses closed and those lucky enough to keep their jobs faced what Welsh calls "dual-sided pressure" — pressure to work from homes that were never meant to be offices, and pressure for workers to drive revenue for their employers in a tough economy. As Xie explained in a TikTok, the pandemic also stripped away the "ancillary perks" — free client dinners, coworker camaraderie, and holiday parties — that made many jobs bearable. Without those perks, workers performed solitary, grinding work.

As businesses reopened, users still had a huge appetite for work-related content on social platforms. The hot job market encouraged people to make major career pivots — giving birth to the Great Resignation. It wasn't just remote-office workers making the leap; in-person, "essential" workers left jobs that had become major health risks. According to one California-based study, the professions that saw the highest excess-death rates in 2020 all required in-person work: transportation-and-logistics workers, food-and-agriculture workers, and manufacturing workers. In-person jobs, particularly in the hospitality industry, also saw the highest quit rates in 2021. A Pew Research study conducted in February 2022 found that 53% of the people surveyed who quit a job in 2021 had also changed their occupation or field of work. Dan Space, an HR business partner who runs the TikTok account @dan_from_hr, said he views the Great Resignation — or as many people are now calling it, the Great Reshuffle — as people "moving their careers away from chance and more into choice."

Intentional choices take research, and the Great Reshuffle sparked demand for in-depth information about work. "Workfluencers"— creators eager to help people understand new roles and fields — stepped into this void. Everyone I spoke to had their own reasons for sharing about their jobs online: Xie wanted to flatten the playing field for first-generation lawyers like herself; Space wanted to correct rampant misinformation about HR; and Welsh wanted to consciously build a personal brand. "If you can build a personal brand, you can go anywhere you want," Welsh said.

These influencers also noticed that sharing behind-the-scenes work content got engagement. It wasn't just Xie who saw high engagement on her first video. Maddie Machado, a former Meta and LinkedIn recruiter turned solopreneur, said she got serious traction with her first post on her TikTok, a since-deleted breakdown of Meta's lavish work-from-home perks like an annual $3,000 wellness stipend.

Workfluencers capitalize on interest

The explosion of the #careertiktok hashtag has been good for creators' bottom lines. Business creators often monetize their content by selling products like Patreon subscriptions, courses, books, and consulting services. Welsh, for example, promotes a mix of courses and consulting services to his LinkedIn audience, which has helped him make $3 million since August 2019 — nearly $1 million a year. Workfluencers can also make money from brand partnerships: TikTok's resident corporate-culture commentator, Corporate Natalie, recently partnered with the HR-tech platform Paycom on a TV campaign.

Not everyone has the time to create their own content, so work content's success on LinkedIn has also inspired a burgeoning industry of ghostwriters. One ghostwriter told Vox that she's earning enough money ghostwriting for various entrepreneurs that she has turned down other job offers; she charges $800 a month for a single client and up to $9,000 for longer commitments.

Some platforms have encouraged career influencers growing their audiences, seeing them as a valuable way to get people engaged. In 2021, LinkedIn announced that it was building an internal team to recruit and support creators on the platform. Since its inception, this team has encouraged posting authentic, educational content about work on the platform. "We get constant communication from them encouraging us to share workplace, personal, candid, open stories," Welsh said of LinkedIn.

And the company has embraced its own employees' efforts to build personal brands and audiences. Brian Xu, a data scientist at LinkedIn, has over 1.5 million followers on TikTok. The company has featured him on its social channels and in internal communications. Machado said that during her first week at LinkedIn, Xu led a workshop in the LinkedIn office about how the creator economy works. Xu said his presentation, called "A Guide to the Creator Economy for Out-of-Touch Tech Professionals," covered his take on the core skills creators need to build and monetize followings.

Machado said that the ideal relationship between a creator employee and an employer is a partnership. LinkedIn isn't the only company nurturing these partnerships: Places like Walmart and Samsung are also building employee-influencer programs.

Embracing internal creators can help companies retain high-profile talent and recruit new workers. When Welsh posted daily to LinkedIn while at his full-time job, his social success came back to help his company: He and his colleague were able to drive "a tremendous number of candidate referrals" with their personal brands. "People wanted to work with us," Welsh said.

But in Machado's experience, most companies don't know what to do with in-house social-media creators who post about their work. Company leadership often thinks of employees' personal platforms as double-edged swords. "Your voice has a lot of power," Machado said, repeating the social-media guidance she received at LinkedIn. "The same power that you have to get people interested in the company is the same power you have to get people disinterested."

Be careful what you share

Sharing workplace details online can help creators build audiences and help their followers discover new careers — but it comes with a built-in risk of backlash. Few know that better than Braden Wallake, the CEO of the marketing startup HyperSocial, also known as "the crying CEO." After laying off two employees in August, he posted a photo of himself on LinkedIn with tears streaming down his face. "I just want people to see that not every CEO out there is cold-hearted and doesn't care when he/she have to lay people off," he wrote in the post's lengthy caption. Commenters called his post "disgusting," "virtue signaling," and "self-serving."

Natasha Badger, a customer-marketing associate at LinkedIn, also sparked heated discussion with TikTok day-in-the-life vlogs set in LinkedIn's Chicago offices. The amenities she highlighted include heated eucalyptus towels, panna cotta dessert with lunch, and a spa outing during the workday. The post proved divisive. Commenters criticized the lavish work perks and questioned what Badger actually did. As the venture capitalist and podcaster David Sacks put it in a tweet: "Does anyone still work?" Badger has since deleted her posts about LinkedIn's offices.

For some, the profusion of social content about work perks and struggles is getting in the way of actual work. "Now the feed is an obstacle," Sofía Martín Jiménez, a Madrid-based recruiter, told The New York Times. "I had to change my way of working on LinkedIn," she said, explaining that she now focuses more on search to avoid confessional posts and find details relevant for recruiting.

Beyond online flack, sharing too much about your job can cost you. Employees can and do get fired for posting about work. Machado quit her job at Meta after sharing openly about it on TikTok. According to Machado, the company launched multiple investigations into various posts she made about her job, including a video about a Facebook program supporting recruiter candidates from non-traditional backgrounds; a video joking about how few hours a week she worked; and a video recommending Levels.fyi, a crowdsourced salary resource. "It was the most humiliating experience of my life," she said. When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Meta said it does not comment on specific personnel matters.

Every company has its own guidelines about what employees can share publicly. As more workers turn to the internet for workplace gossip, it's important to know what lines not to cross. In her next role after Meta, Machado proactively talked about her TikTok in the recruiting process. Once hired, she was sure to reach out to company HR and legal for approval before posting any work-related content. She told me her current philosophy is: "Get ahead of it before it's a problem."

Space, who's currently hunting for full-time roles, has been open about his TikTok in interviews — and it's given some employers, especially bigger companies, cold feet. Because he's a popular creator, hiring committees worry that he could portray the company in a negative light if he has a bad experience — or leave after three months and return to content-creation full time.

Despite the skepticism he's encountered on his job search, Space said his TikTok account has been worth it. He's learned a lot from TikTok on how confusing HR is to outsiders and how to improve the sector. "We just need to do so much of a better job marketing it," he said.

Mae Rice is a freelance editor, writer, and reporter based in Chicago.