LinkedIn, over the past few years, has transitioned from a platform allowing job searching and connections, to a platform for building a social and professional presence. And just like any other social media platform, it has become an important place to build an audience to share your thoughts. This has allowed for a lot of credible creators to show up and share valuable insights with the community, however, just like any other platform, there are people who misuse the community’s trust to farm for engagement.

A lot of people join LinkedIn in order to start a job search, usually early in their academic phase with little to no corporate experience. They apply to every relevant job opportunity, make connections, and hope something works out. But the sad reality is, apart from a very limited, genuine job posters, LinkedIn today is full of fake ‘HR Recruiters’ who post with the sole purpose of growing their account through engagement farming.

Engagement farming on LinkedIn refers to using the sentiments of people, especially job-seekers to have them interact with your content in order to grow your account’s engagement. Here’s a classic example that you might have come across:

A post appears claiming there is a hiring opportunity, and instead of sharing a direct link or a clear application process, the author asks people to comment a specific word like “Interested,” “CV,” or “Hiring,” promising that a link will be sent or that someone will review their profile. At first glance, it looks efficient and even supportive. In reality, it often functions as little more than engineered engagement. An example post would look like the one attached below.

Here are the red flags you’re supposed to look out for:

• No clear Job Description or Job Title.
• A vague pay-range.
• Prompts that ask you to comment without a clear way to reach out to the hiring team.
• Gmail accounts as the above post instead of well-defined corporate emails such as xyz@organization.com
• Any job posting that charges you a fee to start the process.

Now you shouldn’t be surprised when I tell you, that this account has been making such posts for a very long time, and they have 32000+ followers on LinkedIn. We can’t be sure how many of those are bot accounts, but looking at their engagements, there are for sure a lot of people. The reason for the insane levels of their ‘popularity’ is the desperation of job-seekers in a harsh job market.

Every time someone comments or interacts with their posts, LinkedIn pushes it to more and more job seekers fueling their engagement strategy. I have personally seen countless such engagement campaigns with tons of red-flags, yet, there are always innocent job seekers attaching hope with every single post, and it’s heartbreaking.

This not only applies to freshers, but experienced professionals as well. Publicly signaling that you are looking for work is not always a comfortable choice, yet these posts encourage people to do exactly that in a highly visible way, rather than providing a choice to apply via email – something that most professional organizations tend to do.

The below is an example post that I created on LinkedIn back when I used to work in recruitment.

See the difference? You probably do.

Apart from the engagement-farming issue, there is a digital security aspect to this as well.

When someone comments “Interested”, they are announcing that they are currently seeking employment. Their profile, role history, seniority level, and network become immediately accessible. A threat actor does not need sophisticated tooling to scrape that list of commenters and build a curated database of active job seekers. From there, highly targeted phishing campaigns become much easier to execute, whether through fake recruiter emails, fraudulent assessment links, or impersonated HR communications. Vulnerability combined with urgency is a powerful combination in social engineering, and public engagement patterns make targeting far more efficient.

Not only this, malicious actors might redirect job seekers to external websites or data-collection methods such as Google Forms, effectively collecting sensitive data about non-suspecting individuals.

We have already seen phishing infrastructure evolve to proxy legitimate websites in real time and capture credentials with alarming precision. Now imagine pairing that capability with a ready-made list of individuals actively looking for jobs. What begins as engagement farming can quickly become intelligence gathering for more serious campaigns.

If you’ve read this far, I hope you’ll be more aware to check what you’re getting yourself into. And if you’re someone who works in the Recruitment or Talent Acquisition industry, share this with your own network to help them stay aware of the risks behind these ‘harmless’ engagement farming tactics.