The Professional Network That Isn’t

LinkedIn was founded in 2003 and acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for £18 billion. It has over a billion registered users. It is, by any measure, the dominant platform for professional networking in the world.

It is also, for most experienced contractors, almost entirely useless — and in some respects actively misleading. This article is an attempt to explain why, and to suggest a more realistic way of thinking about what it’s actually good for.

What LinkedIn Is

LinkedIn is an American platform with an American set of cultural assumptions baked into its design. The core assumption is that work is something to be celebrated publicly — that promotions are achievements worth announcing, that job changes are milestones worth broadcasting, and that the appropriate response to professional contact is enthusiastic affirmation.

This produces a feed that is, in the main, a stream of self-congratulation, motivational content of dubious origin, and carefully curated career narratives in which every setback was secretly a growth opportunity and every redundancy was ‘an exciting chance to pivot.’ The tone is relentlessly upbeat in a way that bears very little resemblance to how professional life actually feels from the inside.

For contractors, the gap between the LinkedIn version of working life and the reality is particularly wide. The platform is built around the idea of a career — a linear progression through increasingly senior roles at recognisable companies. It has no real framework for the consultant’s experience: multiple short engagements, gaps between contracts, work at companies that can’t be named in detail, achievements that can’t be described without breaching confidentiality.

The CV Problem

A consultant’s LinkedIn profile, if it accurately reflects their career, tends to look alarming to anyone applying permanent-employment assumptions. A series of three-month and six-month engagements reads as instability. A gap between contracts reads as unemployment. The algorithm that surfaces profiles to recruiters is calibrated for a different kind of career.

The standard advice is to aggregate contract work under a single consultancy entity — ‘Independent Consultant, 2015–present’ — which solves the optics problem but obscures the actual experience. Neither approach is entirely satisfactory, and both involve a degree of presentation management that permanent employees simply don’t have to think about.

The Network That Isn’t

LinkedIn calls itself a professional network. The word ‘network’ implies relationships — people who know each other, who have worked together, who would take a call from each other on the basis of shared history. What LinkedIn actually provides is an address book of people you’ve met once, worked alongside briefly, or connected with at a conference you attended four years ago.

The moment a contract ends, the social reality of the relationships built during it dissolves almost immediately. What remains is a connection request, sometimes accepted on the last day as a gesture of goodwill, from someone whose name you’ll struggle to place six months later. That’s not a network. It’s a list.

Real professional networks — the kind that generate referrals, recommendations, and genuine intelligence about clients and opportunities — are built through repeated contact over time, mutual usefulness, and the kind of candid conversation that doesn’t happen on a public platform where everything is visible to current and future clients.

The Recommendation Problem

LinkedIn recommendations are the platform’s attempt to provide social proof of competence. In theory, a strong set of recommendations from credible people is useful. In practice, most LinkedIn recommendations are written by people who feel obligated to say something positive, use a vocabulary of vague professional virtues (‘consummate professional,’ ‘real asset to the team,’ ‘would not hesitate to work with again’), and carry very little weight with anyone who reads them critically.

In fact I have had requests for recommendations out of the blue from people I don’t know using phrases like “it’s a win-win situation”. I always report them.

Contractors face an additional difficulty: the people best placed to recommend them — the clients who can speak to the actual quality of the work — are often the least likely to do so publicly. Companies are careful about what their employees endorse externally, and a glowing LinkedIn recommendation from a senior manager at a major client can raise questions about confidentiality and competitive information.

What It Is Actually Useful For

This isn’t an argument for abandoning LinkedIn. It’s an argument for using it with accurate expectations rather than treating it as something it isn’t.

It is genuinely useful as a directory. If you want to find out who currently works at a company, what their role is, or whether you have any connection to them, LinkedIn is the fastest way to do that. For contractors researching a potential client — finding out who the relevant managers are, what their backgrounds look like, whether anyone in your existing network has worked there — it’s a reasonable starting point.

It is also useful for basic visibility. Recruiters do search LinkedIn, and a profile that accurately represents your skills and availability will occasionally generate inbound contact that leads somewhere. The return on time invested is low but not zero.

And it serves as a lightweight record of where you’ve been — useful when you’re trying to reconstruct the timeline of a career that spans many short engagements and aren’t sure whether a particular contract was 2018 or 2019.

What Maven Net Does Differently

The professional intelligence that LinkedIn can’t provide — what it’s actually like to work at a particular client site, whether a manager is competent or chaotic, whether the rate being offered reflects what the market is paying — is exactly what this site is for.

That kind of information doesn’t circulate on LinkedIn because LinkedIn is a public platform where everyone is performing for their professional audience. It circulates between people who trust each other enough to speak plainly, outside the view of clients and agencies.

Which is, to be direct about it, why an anonymous platform hosted outside US, UK and EU jurisdiction is more useful for this purpose than a billion-dollar American social network with a terms of service that runs to forty pages.