InLove: How to find love on LinkedIn

We’re all familiar with LinkedIn as a professional networking platform, but, with it being Valentine’s Day, I think it’s time to blend love and tech by visiting the idea of using LinkedIn to find love! Any other day of the year, this article might be a stretch for ZDNet; however, not only is this an exercise in searching for love, but you’ll also be learning some investigative skills, as well as honing in on ways to use LinkedIn that will transpose well to professional endeavors you may seek in the future. So keep that in mind and, without further ado, let’s get this party started.

I’m no stranger to the online dating scene, but the last time I utilized an online dating Web site was over 5 years ago. Back then, there was Yahoo Personals (where I met the wonderful woman who still puts up with me to this day 🙂 ), eHarmony, Match, and perhaps a couple of others. Pickings were pretty slim between all of them for a number of reasons: 1) everyone put their profiles on all the same sites, 2) the ratio of men to women was grossly disproportional, and 3) of the infinitesimally small number of female profiles, it seemed that a large majority of them were fake.

Today, however, there’s an abundance of dating sites! Unfortunately, of the people I know who participate on them (all males), it seems they fall victim to the very same factors I listed above. That got me thinking, “where could I find a site that satisfies even one of the three criteria currently lacking on dating sites?” Well, considering how much I use LinkedIn, the unorthodox seed was planted: “What if you could actually use LinkedIn as a sort of dating site?” I laughed to myself at the onset of the idea, but as I began to think it through, it seemed plausible!

Accordingly, I offer no guarantees with this. This is just something I would seriously considering trying if I were single, simply due to the thought that using LinkedIn as a dating site seems to satisfy much of what I consider to be the problem areas of dating sites — perhaps the most paramount being the fact that there are great pickings for both men and women, and the factor of fake profiles seems to be greatly diminished. Neither of those are fool-proof, of course, but as I continue to delve into all of this, I hope to make my point to the extent that at least one of you out there can give it a shot and maybe even post a comment here if you successfully meet someone from LinkedIn with romance in mind! Wouldn’t that be a cool story to tell?

1) A LinkedIn account (free!)

2) Google (free!)

3) Know-how (free, courtesy of this very article!)

For this segment, I figured I would turn to YouTube and record a video that shows and explains what would otherwise take far more effort to craft with words, steps, and screen shots. Plus, I don’t know about you, but I’m much more fond of live instructional over that of text-based instructional! Here we go (watch in 1080p, full-screen so you can see the details):