Stop Sending Your LinkedIn. It's Not Your Identity.
The brief
LinkedIn is rented identity infrastructure. The address, the shape, and the audience all belong to someone else. A few thoughts on what to send instead.
Renting your identity from a feed-driven platform is a strange way to be findable.
You know this without thinking about it. When you ask someone to "send me your LinkedIn," you're not asking them for their identity — you're asking them for the version of themselves Microsoft's product team has decided is publishable. The bio you pasted in 2019. The role description that used to be true. The headshot from a job two companies ago. The activity feed pinned to whatever algorithm the platform shipped this quarter.
You wouldn't accept this from a website. If a portfolio site loaded different content depending on what mood the host was in, you'd consider it broken. If a press kit pretended you didn't write the thing you wrote two months ago, you'd file a correction. The standards you hold for every other professional surface, you suspend for LinkedIn — because LinkedIn is what we have, and what we have is what we use.
But it isn't yours.
The address is owned. Linkedin.com/in/yourname is a rental property. The terms can change, the layout can change, the surrounding ads can change, the visibility can change, the audience can change, and you have no recourse. The recruiters who find you find you because LinkedIn lets them. The visitors who don't find you don't find you for the same reason. You are findable on LinkedIn at the platform's discretion, in the format the platform chooses, in front of the audience the platform routes.
The shape is rented too. Posts have to look like LinkedIn posts. Bios have to fit LinkedIn fields. Your "About" section is a 2,000-character box that dies when the page loads on mobile. Your career — the actual texture of what you've built — is compressed into a format that began as a resume scanner and has spent twenty years pretending it isn't.
The audience is rented. The same algorithm that surfaced your post to a recruiter on Tuesday will bury it under a polished thought-leader the same recruiter follows on Wednesday. You don't control this. You can't predict it. You can't measure it without paying.
The version of you that lives there is not the version of you you'd describe if asked.
A friend told me last fall that she'd spent eleven minutes editing her LinkedIn headline before a board meeting, because three people in that meeting were about to google her, and her current title — the right one, the one she earned — wouldn't appear in the search preview unless she changed how the page rendered. She told me this with a small embarrassed laugh. The laugh was the reflex of a competent person noticing she was performing maintenance on infrastructure she didn't own and didn't want to think about.
This is the underrated cost. Not the explicit fees. Not the data exhaust. Not the privacy quibble that occupies most of the writing about platform identity. The cost is the quiet work of keeping a rented version of yourself presentable, in a format you didn't design, for an audience the platform decides who is.
This is the case for renting. And it is fair: LinkedIn is, in fact, where the recruiters live. It is where the cold messages land, where the connection requests originate, where the alumni find each other after a decade of drift. There is real distribution there. Walking away from that distribution is not free.
So don't walk away. Stay where the distribution is. But stop confusing distribution infrastructure with identity infrastructure.
A LinkedIn page is a flyer at a job fair. A useful surface, a real audience, a known format. It is not the artifact you should be sending when someone wants to know who you are.
The shift that closes this gap is older than the internet, although the internet briefly forgot it. People have always had identity infrastructure separate from the venues where they were findable. Calling cards were not the dinner invitation. Letterhead was not the conference. The address engraved on the silver tray was not the same thing as the silver tray.
The link that represents you is the engraved address. It travels with you. It works whether the rented venue is open or closed, whether the algorithm is friendly or cold, whether the platform exists in five years or doesn't. It is the stable thing in a portfolio of unstable surfaces.
What sits there is up to you. Your work, your scope, your availability, your past, the things you'd say if asked. The recognition the doorman gives at the threshold — what brought you here? — and the routed answer that follows. None of which LinkedIn knows how to do, because it was never designed to.
The next time someone asks for your LinkedIn, you can still send it. Habits are slow to change and the mismatch is not their problem. But also send the link that's actually yours — the one you Parlei, the one you keep, the one that doesn't depend on a platform's quarterly priorities to remain visible.
The platform is the venue. You are not the venue.