does posting sob stories on LinkedIn hurt your job search?

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I work in a field that has been heavily affected by layoffs in the past year. I have been lucky and managed to maintain work, but many talented people I know have not been so lucky.

My question is about whether posting depressing, sad posts on social media, especially LinkedIn, affects your hiring potential.

I have seen many of my former coworkers posting status updates that include how they been out of work for many months, they are burning through their savings, they applied to hundreds of positions only to be rejected by AI recruitment tools or ghosted by human hiring teams, and, in some cases, that they are are about to be homeless.

While I will not argue that the current job market is incredibly difficult, I worry that they are hurting themselves with potential employers who might unfairly see them as “difficult.”

I would like to know your take on this and what you would recommend on posting status updates like this on LinkedIn.

Yes, they are likely to be hurting their chances with prospective employers.

Employers tend to want to feel they’re hiring someone who’s in-demand — or at least someone who 100 other companies haven’t looked at and said, “We’ll pass.”

To be clear, this is not aligned with the realities of job-seeking and hiring. It’s not uncommon for talented people to struggle to find jobs, especially in a tight market, and being unemployed or having a long job search isn’t a sign that someone shouldn’t be hired.

But it’s not helpful to raise those questions in a hiring manager’s mind.

Moreover, hiring managers — being humans — tend to respond better to optimism than to cynicism, pessimism, or bitterness. That doesn’t mean that cynicism, pessimism, or bitterness are never warranted — but when you want people to hire you, making that your branding on a professional networking site is a bad move.