Postbag

Mary Wu voice note about the use of someone else's account.

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Grad's Guide 2026 – some stats around the current jobs market.

• Main report
• UK version
• US version

Creative Collision at LinkedIn HQ on 28 April

There is no 360Brew anymore?

AI People search reaches all of the US

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What is the current state of the jobs market? We're going to take a quick look at that today in episode 487 of the Informed podcast.

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Informed podcast. I'm your host, John Espirian, and this is the show where we answer your LinkedIn questions and talk all about LinkedIn best practice. And as usual, we're going to kick off with listener questions in the Postbag.

OK, our question this week comes from an Espresso+ member. It's Mary Wu.

Hi, John. It's Mary Wu from Nashville, Tennessee.

I was listening to a podcast the other day and a woman was going on and on about her wonderful service of going into people's LinkedIn profiles and creating their connections for them. As far as I am aware, from my understanding of the user agreement, and it is not allowed to log into somebody else's account.

I was wondering if there was any legal to LinkedIn workaround. Maybe if you're using Sales Navigator or something else where you can go into somebody else's account and take actions on their behalf.

I'm just wanting to make sure I'm not missing anything. Thanks so much and have a fabulous day.

Well, thank you for the question, Mary, and yes, I think your intuitions are right here. For personal accounts, you're not really allowed to share those details with anyone else.

The User Agreement that everyone signs when they join LinkedIn gets updated from time to time. I'm looking at the current version. Section 2.2 there says you will not share your account with anyone else, and will follow our policies and the law. And then there's a few more details beneath that.

So, it's pretty clear that you're not meant to share your details.

I mean, in practice I'm sure that it does happen, but if you get caught doing it, then your account could be restricted, and obviously you don't want to take that kind of risk.

Things are a bit different when it comes to company pages, though. So, company pages can assign administrator rights and editorial rights to other people, and those are really designed to be managed beyond just a single person, because they represent a whole company.

So, where it comes to company page content, that's really not an issue so much.

But with personal pages, you are not meant to give your profile details to anyone else to access to post as you, to do direct messages as you. That is against the User Agreement. And if you get caught, there's a chance that you might get your account restricted.

So, LinkedIn are reporting that there's been a 6% year-on-year decrease in entry-level hiring.

There's been a 10% year-on-year decrease in mid-level hiring.

21% of Gen Z have started a business or a side hustle, and 22% of Gen Z are building apps, websites or other projects to showcase their skills.

The figures are increasing with each stat, by the way.

44% of Gen Z say that not having the right network is the biggest barrier to landing an entry-level role.

And finally, 72% of young office workers are considering a switch to skilled trades.

So, there's something interesting in each of those stats, I think.

But the initial ones about the decrease in entry-level and mid-level hiring is probably the most significant and probably the most worrying.

I've got a 16-year-old daughter. I'm not sure what the jobs market is going to be like when by the time she actually starts working, whatever that's going to be in.

I don't know how much of this is attributable to AI. There's a lot of talk about that in the media about AI being responsible for taking certainly entry-level positions as those things get automated away.

I think there's a number of factors going on there, but certainly if that trend continues, with more and more people in the world, you would think that there shouldn't really be a decrease in hiring of entry-level jobs. But nevertheless that seems to be what's happening.

So, I'm going to link to the report. There are specific versions of this report for different regions including the UK and the US, so I'll point to those as well if you want to check them out and see what you think.

If you're one of those people who is listening to the podcast soon after it goes out, there's still time for you to sign up for an in-person LinkedIn event. This is being run by LinkedIn at LinkedIn London. It's called the Creative Collision series.

It's not a title I've heard from them before, but it's free to go along.

I've taken a look at the agenda. I don't think it really appeals to me and I'm a bit busy at the moment, so I can't really get myself from South Wales to London just for this.

But I'll share the link to the event if you happen to be in and around London when this goes ahead.

It's happening on Tuesday 28 April from 9am to 12.30pm. That's another blocker for me because I'd have to go the night before to be able to make that event. But I'll share that link. You can check it out and perhaps you'll have a reason to visit LinkedIn HQ for free. And if you do, let me know what you thought of the event.

This week there was a post by Tim Jurka, who works at LinkedIn, talking about changes to the LinkedIn feed and the algorithm, as he often does, and one interesting point that he made is that someone was asking a question about 360Brew, which is a term you may have heard before when referencing changes to the LinkedIn algorithm.

Tim gave an interesting answer.

He wrote: "During this session that we ran, a question came up that I've heard quite a bit lately. Is 360Brew used as part of your ranking system?"

Now, to me, that's not a particularly significant bit of news, because when people refer to 360Brew, what they really mean is, the changes that have happened to the LinkedIn feed algorithms over the past year. And there's no doubt in my mind that changes have happened and thankfully for the better.

So, 360Brew is just a label really, and if LinkedIn are saying that's not the accurate label to use for what has actually happened, then fair enough, but they're not denying that changes have happened to the algorithm, it's just that they're not internally recognising that as being associated with 360Brew. And they're saying that 360Brew was a limited test with a small number of people and they're not doing that anymore.

Fair enough, but I'm very happy that the changes to the algorithm have been made because my feed is now feeling a lot more relevant.

There's a lot more knowledge-first content, which is what I'm interested in seeing, and the crucial change for me is that I'm seeing more suggested posts from people I don't know, but whose content is relevant and interesting to me and that helps me move my business forward. So, thumbs up to LinkedIn on that one, but let's not call it 360Brew anymore.

Last item for this week is that there was another article by someone at LinkedIn. This time, Jill Raines, who has posted to say, among other things, that the new AI-powered People search is now spreading to everyone across the US. I've briefly had this at my end.

So, you know, it is quite limiting I suppose, for the average user looking through LinkedIn. So long as you get relevant search results, then perhaps you're never going to move on to page 2 and worry about the full scope of the results. But if you're a power user then you certainly would.

As I say, I haven't played with it enough because it's only briefly been with me and then has been taken away.

But if you're in the US you should expect imminently to get this new AI-powered People search where LinkedIn is actually expecting you to write in more natural language style and maybe specify a number of different things that you're looking for: an accountant who plays golf and used to live in France or something. I'm not sure why you'd want to look for someone like that, but you'd be able to put in queries like that and the AI-powered search should be able to surface the kind of people you're looking for, whereas the old search would wouldn't really have had a clue where to get started on that. So, it's one to look out for.

I think I'll leave it at that for now. One other thing to point out is that I do have now the details for our first UpLift Live Nano event of the year, which is going to be in Bristol. So, I'm going to be sharing those details with the Espresso+ community first and then we'll have public booking link to follow.

So, stay tuned for that. Thank you for listening as ever. If you have any questions for the show, please drop me a line. Ideally a voice note, but any text would do, and I'll include it on the next show. And until then, I'll speak to you soon.