Wait, has LinkedIn become a dating app?

Samuela John never set out to use LinkedIn for dating. Instead, suitors came to her.

Three separate men slid into her DMs in early 2023. While she had received messages on the workplace-focused social-media site before, these were different. "They would disguise it, like, 'I have this company and I'm looking for someone to fill this position,'" John, a 24-year-old personal organizer in New York City, told me. While each of the men had the plausible deniability of a connection or two in common with her, she said it was immediately clear that their motives were not strictly professional — one of them worked in the oil industry, a field far removed from anything she'd ever done for a living. Someone else might have scoffed at their advances, but John was newly single at the time, and she was intrigued.

"I'm always looking for someone who has a stable career, who is preferably well off," she said, "not to say that I'm looking for sugar daddies but someone who can take care of themselves." On LinkedIn, she figured, she could fairly assess whether a romantic prospect's employment history, education, and career aspirations lined up with the kind of partner she envisioned for herself. At the very least, she would know whether the man had a job.

While the other two failed to catch her interest, John sensed chemistry with the oil-industry man and decided to see where things would go. One conversation led to another until the two had spent 1 ½ months flirting over phone calls and text messages. It was during that phase of the relationship that John posed a question on TikTok: "Why is LinkedIn low-key a good dating app?"

It's hard to estimate how many of LinkedIn's 1 billion reported members are using the site to find love. The company doesn't collect or release data on the matter, and its community-policies page prohibits using the platform for romantic advances, emphasizing: "LinkedIn is a professional networking platform, not a dating site." But plenty of posts and articles suggest many LinkedIn users have long used the site for romance. And as LinkedIn use has soared in the age of remote work, using the platform to find a date has gotten more popular. But that leaves the question: Is it a good idea to mix work and love?

Looking for love on LinkedIn

Dustin Kidd, a professor of sociology at Temple University who researches social media and pop culture, said that dating via LinkedIn belonged to a long tradition of "dating hacks" — using online tools designed for other purposes to snag a date. "In the aughts, this happened with Friendster and then Myspace," Kidd said, but has since spread to myriad platforms that are ostensibly romance-free. Even fitness-tracking sites such as Strava are fair game. The common thread for love-hijacked social-media sites is a single feature, Kidd said: DMs.

"The design of LinkedIn helps to maintain its focus on the professional, but any platform with a direct-messaging option is likely to also be used to pursue sex and dating," he told me.

The ease and relative privacy of direct messaging help explain how some people are using LinkedIn for romance, but it doesn't explain why. In an age with so many dedicated dating platforms — from giants such as Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge to niche apps including Feeld (for the unconventional), Pure (for the noncommittal), and NUiT (for the astrologically inclined) — why mix Cupid's arrow with corporate updates?

One answer may be the growing number of Americans who have gotten tired of the roulettelike experience that comes with modern dating apps. In a 2023 Pew survey of US adults, nearly one-third of respondents said they had used an online dating site or app at least once. More than half of women who had used the apps reported feeling overwhelmed by the number of messages they had received in the past year, while 64% of men said they felt insecure from the lack of messages they had gotten. Though an overwhelming majority of men and women said they'd felt excited about people they connected with, an even-larger proportion of respondents said they were sometimes or often disappointed by their matches.

Online, it isn't always easy to know whether the human behind an alluring profile is who and what they say they are. Even relatively innocuous virtual deceptions — such as outdated or ultraflattering photos of themselves that misrepresent how they look in person or fudged facts about their interests and accomplishments — can be disheartening. Then there are the people who fabricate or steal their entire profile, a practice known as "catfishing," leaving anyone getting hit up by a stranger online justifiably skeptical. All these deceptions have left many people with dating-app fatigue as they search for ways to take back some control of their romantic fate.

LinkedIn's appeal as a dating site, according to people who use it that way, is the platform's ability to give back some of that control and boost the caliber of their prospects. Because the professional-networking site asks users to link to their current and former employers' profile pages, it offers an additional layer of credibility that other social-media platforms lack. Many profiles also include first-person references from former colleagues and managers — real people with real profile pages.

Some users have taken this idea to the extreme. Last summer, a British expat in Singapore, Candice Gallagher, made waves after posting a TikTok video in which she said LinkedIn had "A-grade filters" for finding "A-grade men" — namely, doctors, lawyers, and "finance bros." In the post, she touted the various filters you could use to track down ideal partners. More recently, a screenshot of the tech entrepreneur George Hotz's LinkedIn bio was shared on X. In his bio, Hotz declared that he now used the site "exclusively as a dating platform" and laid out a catalog of requisite attributes — "intelligent, attractive, female, in or visiting San Diego" — for his ideal match. "Send me a message and invite me out for a drink," he wrote.

Even for those who shy away from using LinkedIn to angle for dates, the site has become a go-to tool for vetting romantic candidates found through conventional dating apps or in-person encounters.

"Social media is just one big dating app," John told me. "Any type of social media where you can see people's pictures can turn into a dating app. And LinkedIn is even better because it's not just showing people's fake lives."

A question of consent

Charlotte Warren, a 30-year-old content creator who lives in Austin, sees things differently. Warren posts TikTok videos about dating and has received more than her fair share of advances from unknown men on LinkedIn. Though she said that the men were usually reaching out under some flimsy guise of professional networking or "mentorship," many had bare-bones profile pages that suggested they weren't seriously using the platform for work. Several of her friends and colleagues across genders have received similar messages, she said, and were similarly put off by them.

"Everyone uses LinkedIn differently, but I think for the most part, people find it pretty invasive and inappropriate" for people to use it as a way to find romantic partners, Warren told me.

In a survey from last year, respondents agreed. In May, Passport Photo Online asked more than 1,000 female LinkedIn users in the US about romance on the platform. While the survey wasn't strictly scientific, an overwhelming 91% reported receiving romantic overtures or otherwise inappropriate messages on the platform. Three-quarters said that at one point or another, these unwanted advances drove them to limit their activity on the site.

Caitlin Begg, the founder of the organizational-communications consultancy Authentic Social and a former LinkedIn employee, boiled the dilemma down to a question of consent. "When I sign up for a dating app, I am signing up to get messages around dating. I'm open to these kinds of messages," Begg said. On LinkedIn, where no such understanding is in place, those who cross the platform's implicit boundaries risk damaging their professional relationships and reputations. It's kind of like flirting at the office or trying to pick up dates at a big company off-site event: It might kindle a mutual spark, but it might get you fired.

Jan Yager, a sociology lecturer at John Jay College and the author of several books on friendship and dating, agreed that LinkedIn users should tread carefully: "The main goal of LinkedIn is professional relationships and career-related benefits. Anyone on LinkedIn has to be very careful not to do anything inappropriate when it comes to seeking romance if that is his or her goal — or it could backfire big time."

On the flip side, the internet has blurred boundaries between people's professional and personal lives for years: Warren met her current boyfriend on TikTok, and my own partnership developed over direct messages on Twitter — a site that we both used to make professional connections and promote our work as journalists. Even offline, future couples can cross paths at the office or in professional circles. For these reasons, Yager conceded that LinkedIn could also fit the bill for uniting romance seekers in an organic and ethical way. It all comes down to how.

"If someone is willing to take their time and let the initial professional connection evolve in a way that is mutually respectful," Yager said, "and if both parties somehow communicate their availability for romance, and they want to go the next step — which might mean a phone or Zoom call or meeting in person in a safe public place — hopefully it is a win-win."

'Phone brain'

Begg, the communications consultant, suspects that rising interest in using LinkedIn for dating stems at least in part from broader feelings of social disconnection. For work, she researches how digital-first communication colors what people want from relationships. These days, she said, more and more people are craving slower and more genuine forms of connection.

"Notification culture — phone brain — has kind of overtaken things," Begg told me. "As it pertains to dating apps, I think everyone, especially post-COVID, has become a little bit jaded. We're sick of the same prompts from the same dating apps and the same kinds of outreach."

Begg has noticed more people choose to forgo digital communication where possible and seek out "IRL situations" for interaction, she said. Some of her friends have gone so far as to delete dating apps from their phones in an effort to meet people in person. For her part, Begg has installed a landline phone in her apartment to facilitate smartphone-free weekends — much to the delight of her analog-curious, film-camera-shooting Gen Z cousins.

While LinkedIn is, of course, a digital platform, Begg believes that some users may be drawn to the site by their desire to replicate (or at least mimic) an analog, water-cooler experience, she added. In many real-life workplaces, that experience has been either diminished or lost entirely through the rise of remote and hybrid work. A significant proportion of younger professionals may have missed out on this type of in-person workplace camaraderie altogether, which could help to explain LinkedIn's recent surge in popularity among teens and 20-somethings.

"We've become so atomized," Begg said. "And that's what I think people are trying to get on LinkedIn, a sense of collectiveness."

Plus, LinkedIn itself is becoming less strictly professional. "LinkedIn influencers are a thing, and I'm noticing a lot more content on LinkedIn that is a bit more social or outside of work," Warren, the TikToker who posts about dating, said. "People are more comfortable saying, 'Here's how I spend my time off,' or, 'Here's what I do after work.'"

As for John, she said that while her flirtation with the oil man fizzled before they could meet in person, she remained open to finding someone on the platform.

"I don't think you should go into it like, 'All right, I'm going to find my husband on LinkedIn,'" John said. "I think you should go about it as if you were just networking, like in a casual sense. And then if you end up meeting the person, see the vibes and then go from there."

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.