R has been my LinkedIn connection for nearly two decades now. Since we stopped working together, I ran into him once at a local park where he was jogging - and that was by now nearly ten years ago. Lately R always has the actively hiring badge on at all times. I did not wise up to this fact at first. A friend had been recently laid off and I pinged R to see if he was hiring for her skills and he replied quite promptly he was not hiring at all as business was tough. I imagined it was a timing thing - the window of opportunity had recently closed.
Sadly, a few more folks I got caught up in other layoff cycles and my pings to R produced exactly the same response. I came to the conclusion that the badge is more signaling and marketing purposes, unrelated to any reality of his business. R manages the US operations for his company - so he has visibility to all US-based roles. That is the reason I even reached out to him the few times that I did.
This badge seems to have become a vanity metric these days - R is the not the only one purporting to be hiring away when infact they are not or haven't been for a while. In theory if a purple unicorn walks in the door asking for intern-level pay with retiree-level experience, R might consider hiring. But that does not describe the average person out in the market looking for work. I wish someone would tell R and those like him to stop sending these false signals of hope specially in tough times such as these have been for many.
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