Nick Little for BI
Samuela John never set out to use LinkedIn for dating. Instead, suitors came to her.
Three separate men slid into her DMs in early 2023. While she had received messages on the workplace-focused social-media site before, these were different. "They would disguise it, like, 'I have this company and I'm looking for someone to fill this position,'" John, a 24-year-old personal organizer in New York City, told me. While each of the men had the plausible deniability of a connection or two in common with her, she said it was immediately clear that their motives were not strictly professional — one of them worked in the oil industry, a field far removed from anything she'd ever done for a living. Someone else might have scoffed at their advances, but John was newly single at the time, and she was intrigued.