And that is what I will tell you. As a creator myself on the platform has been the single most helpful thing for me to help my posts find engagement.
That was Jesse Hemple, Senior editor at Large at LinkedIn and host of the award winning podcast Hello Monday. So if anyone knows what actually moves the needle on LinkedIn, it is Jesse. When it comes to LinkedIn, I wonder
if you can relate to this experience. You post something that you're really proud of and spent quite a while writing, watch it get all of five likes and one comment, which was from your coworker who you specifically asked if they could comment to help with reach, and then you wonder, what on earth am I doing wrong? Jesse and I get into all of it. How AI is reshaping what it means to even have a voice, whether that be
on LinkedIn, in your writing and in your career. We talk about why your LinkedIn profile is doing more heavy lifting than any post you will ever write, and the best way to stand out on LinkedIn. In twenty twenty six, Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day I'm your host, doctor Amantha imber.
Jesse.
You are a senior editor at large at LinkedIn. What does that mean that you actually do all day?
I think that's such a great question. Even as you said it, I thought, wow, that sounds important. I wonder what that person does. And thank you so much for having me on your show. I am a longtime media person and my role here at LinkedIn is to help shape every facet of how LinkedIn's platform can bring trusted information to its members. It's essentially to extend everything that I learned in media during my twenty five years as
we're working as a tech journalist before I came here. Okay, that's the big answer, But the actual practical what do I do every day? I mean, like after I've had my cup of coffee and said hello to the people I work with. In part, I am recording a lot of our outward facing shows. So that is our career podcast, Hello Monday. That is our incredible material that we are making available to premium members, our workshops, our shows. We have a great new show called in the Room Live
for premium members. And that is any writing that we do, any audio bits that we do, and we're always experimenting here. Okay, So if you think of three buckets, that's one bucket. The second bucket is to think critically about how we can be supporting creators out there. You know, this is a moment when every professional can grow by thinking of themselves as a creator. And some of those creators, they
are big names. They're folks like Mel Robbins, Amantha Imber, people who you just hope to emulate as you develop your strategy. That's part of what I'm talking about, but not at all everyone that I'm talking about. It's my conviction that everybody who is a working professional in today's landscape has a lot to benefit by thinking of themselves as a creator in the social media ecosystem. So that's
the second bucket. And then the third bucket, Amantha, we have this incredible team of people who sit on our content team here at LinkedIn. We actually have hundreds of people who are paying close attention to how news moves on our platform. And I get to take a role in shaping that, in working with the young people coming up in our system, in transferring my values around what good editorial work looks like to that group of people coming up.
That's great like I imagine that's very much of your world involves consuming content from different sources, and obviously a lot from LinkedIn, but I imagine a lot from all over the place. I would love to know where are your go to sources for keeping up with the world of work, which is so big.
I love that you ask that. I mean, I'll tell you that my go to source. And I'm not saying this because I work for LinkedIn but is LinkedIn and is not in fact the voices of people like me, but that everyday people who are writing about.
Their experiences in the job market.
And I will also tell you that I try really hard to take in information from everywhere. I read the New York Times, but I also make sure that I'm reading the Financial Times, a Washington Post, a number of newspapers, so traditional newspapers. I also pay attention to so many creators who are actually filtering the news for me. You know, I'll tell you my favorite, and I have read him for a long time. There's a guy named and Dave
Pell who pens a daily newsletter called Next Draft. And this newsletter has been coming out since Substack was a dream in somebody's mind. And he summarizes every day. He calls himself the managing editor of the Internet, and he is also super funny, and he summarizes every day the most important stories and gives highlights of them and tells you where to go deeper. It's actually my front door every morning.
Wow.
I love that too.
I am gonna hunt down that substack next draft. So I'm always curious for people that are creating content for Litty, You're obviously consuming a lot of content and you're creating a lot of content. How has AI influenced things for you? Like, I'm curious, where do you absolutely lean into AI and where are your hardlines saying no, no, this is a human job.
Well, first of all, I'd like to say that I am a tech optimist at my core. I believe firmly that AI offers the most opportunity that we have for solving some of our largest problems in the world. Right But this moment that we're in that is about developing. It is a moment where there's a lot of unknown and a lot of uncertainty. And what that has meant for me and my practice is that I'm early to rush at everything.
And then about two.
Weeks after I try it, I usually figure out can't use AI for that that's not there or that's working really well, I'm going to lean in there. So one great example is that, like in the early days, I was like, oh, well, maybe this AI could I could train AI on every episode of Hello Monday I've ever published, and AI could like write the openings of the.
Episodes for me. That's a terrible idea, but I didn't know it till I tried it.
Right, it turns out that in my experience, AI is not a great writer, and even for me, and only for me, perhaps not a great writer of first drafts. That really AI's opportunity for me, let's start with writing is to push my thinking and it is always a
useful exercise, even though it is a little harder. It's always a useful exercise for me to stare at an empty page, turn off all of my notifications, and be uncomfortable for an hour and get a lot of stuff down that I am not proud of, and then give it to the AI and say what am I missing here? Or how might Amantha think about this that is different than the way that I'm thinking about this. So that is one way that I use it in my writing.
But that's really only the beginning of what I'm thinking about when I think about how that I use these tools in my workflow. We also increasingly can use these tools to edit parts of our video podcast. So Hello Monday exists in video form and we publish it on LinkedIn and on YouTube, and I know that most of the folks who listen to our show really have an audio relationship with it, but I'm also very in interested
in what the video can be over time. We were able to actually bring down the editing process on that thirty minute episode from a full day of a human editor's time to closer to an hour of that time through using an AI program to do a first.
Pass, WHICHI program is this Jesse.
I don't want to say the name of it, only because I don't want to advertise for this particular software, and there are now many softwares who will do this. The bigger point here is that I think that this is a particularly great use of the software because I am having the conversation, I know what I want the conversation to say, and because the video product it isn't the first product of import for us. It's not where we're trying to stand out or make a difference. It's
simply something we want to have in our portfolio. It's truly a gift of automation, and that to me is like AI for the most part, where it helps me right now is automating thing. It is not doing any thinking for me. And in fact, when I begin to rely on it in any facet of my professional life to push the thinking, to do the thinking, I always fall down. Now, we can have this conversation again in six months and I will give you probably an entirely
different answer. But that is okay with me, because this is the moment when we are supposed to be learning, and the only way that we can learn is actually to deploy it in our own practice.
I mean, how have.
You navigated the arrival of AI as a creative as somebody making a show?
Where do you deploy the tool and where do you back off the tool?
Yeah, it's something I think about, gosh, like every day, I would say. So. I've got a couple of businesses and one of them is an AI training company, and every Monday, in How I Work feed, we release an episode that is just about Hey, I tips and how we using it at work and how to get more out of it. So I think about it a lot. I experiment a lot.
As a writer.
I always feel that as a human I'm not using AI to, as you said, do that first draft. And I mean that metaphorically, like I've just written my fifth book and gearing up for the launch of that, and I remember, like in the sort of early ideation parts of the book where I was just really struggling with the structure and really struggling with how are these ideas that I've got in my head going to fit together?
I went on so many walks with my AI, and I tried different prompts with the AI, like sometimes I would get it to interview me and not give me any ideas, like not contribute to the idea generation process. Other times I would ideate with it and then I compare results, and I still feel, like, you know, in that early stage of creating content, the things that are coming from my brain are the things that I really
need to lock in on. I then have different workflows where it comes to editing, like I was working on Publicist at the moment at Penguin, is pitching to different media outlets and do you want an extract of the book, and you know, a pretty big media outlet said, I'd love a month to write something, but it needs to be original but still around the theme of the book. And I thought, well, that's interesting. What an interesting challenge to try me as a human writing that versus where
do I get AI to write that? And I thought, well, as a human, I need to write the first draft. And then I played around with Okay, I'll prompt AI to be an editor of this publication and give me a critique on the draft. And some of that was good, some of that was not. Something I find I'm always
doing now with final drafts. Is it's a skill that I've got in claud that's like an anti AI skill where it goes through my writing and it says, this is what sounds like it's written by AI, because, as I'm sure you would appreciate as a writer, some of the things that we naturally do are now baked into AI and their AI tells, which is so far when it's that's how I write. Oh man, I used to use so many M dashes and now like I'm you know, relying more on brackets.
I just took the phrase here's the thing out of an essay that I was writing right before we were on this call, because I thought, well, I'm not allowed to use that. Cloud took that from me.
You can't use that. I know, I know. It's so sad. I used to say that as well corrective antithesis. I've heard it called a few things like it's not this, it's that, referred to as several things. I use that a lot in my writing, and it's funny.
I was aware of that.
I was recently recording the audiobook of the Energy Game, and whenever I came across that, I'm like, oh, man, that sounds like.
Hey, I write that, but I actually wrote that.
And so I find that having that skill can help me get rid of the things that I would naturally use as a human writer, so that people don't read my work and go, ah, it looks like AI just wrote that when I didn't write that. And that's the worst when you was a human writer and people think AI wrote it because you trually use some of those AI tells, so that I find frustrating.
I think it is amazing that you have written a book against the backdrop of this right now. And I say that because the writer in me is struggling right now. It's struggling both with how do I identify my voice and find a thing to say that it's mine in this world, and also who's around to read it. I don't want to be read by a bunch of agents. I want to use my writing to be a tool to be in conversation with people. You know, I wrote a book that came out in twenty twenty two.
Now.
It was a personal book, it was a memoir. It was very personal project. But that book became a tool for being in deep conversation around things I cared about, and it felt like a method of connection. And there's a piece of me that doesn't trust that a book is that right now, even as I sit here in my role and I speak to people about their books, and it's an unsettled piece, you know, I don't know where will go. But right now it is driving me to want to read a ton and not rate a lot.
And I help that pass this because I'm a rado.
That's what I am Coming up next, Jesse gets into who she thinks is producing some of the best content on LinkedIn right now, including one creator who's built an entire offline and online community through her posting strategy. If you're looking for more tips to improve the way you work can live. I write a short weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've discovered that have helped me personally. You can sign up for that at Amantha dot com. That's
Amantha dot com. I want to talk about LinkedIn, Jesse, and I want to talk about it from a user's perspective, because you know, the platform has obviously changed so much with people writing using AI and not putting there thoughts onto the platform, and this drives me a little bit mad because my feed, you know, and I'm sure you would hear this every day, my feed looks really different to how it did even a year ago, and it actually now takes me a bit of work to curate
my feed. I even did a post yesterday just asking some of the people that I really love their writing, who are they reading, because presumably people that I love reading, people that I would also love And what does it take to grow and engage people on LinkedIn these days? Because you know, I feel like stuff that I would write a year ago and it would get really high engagement is now just getting moderate engagement and then I get really confused and then despondent.
You are not the only person who has said that, right, And I also think that as the condition of modern social media more than just a challenge of the LinkedIn platform?
What do I rate?
That gats engagement? And then I heard in that and you tell me if I'm wrong. I also heard in that. Gosh, everything's starting to sound the same, and I'm wondering if M wrote it all these posts. Those conditions are conditions that I think frame the social ecosystem right now and that we are working through. Here's something I believe about content, right.
We want to know, Amantha, that you did not use your LLM to give me your screed on what makes a good leader, right Like I'm talking to you here. If I get off of this conversation and I jump onto LinkedIn and I read a post from you and it sounds like an LLM wrote it, I'm gonna really
have like distaste in my mouth. And that leaves me to believe that we are in this interim period when it comes to how people are using llms to write the content on their post, that we've all rushed to do it because we think that we can but we are all in the process of discovering.
That UHA does not feel good to read, and.
Oh, everybody's brusted, everybody's using it, and that this is like a bump in the road that we're going to work through on our way to somebody else. Now, my
bet is on the human connection piece of it. And the wonderful thing about LinkedIn as a platform, and the thing that has kept me here at LinkedIn for eight years working in media, is that we care a lot about trust and safety, which means that even if I've never met you, I can pretty much trust that you are a real person and that you have represented yourself according to who you might represent yourself in real life ass And this allows for a kind of healthy ecosystem
around public discourse that does not exist most other places
in the web right now. And if there is a benefit to the fact that LLM has allowed a broader group of people to sort of feel empowered to post their ideas or feel like they have the skills to write those ideas, it is just that that it has sort of brought down the bar for access for a lot of folks and actually more likely to run into more people that you know in real life people I know from my kids' school of people I know from the last job writing on LinkedIn and being in conversation
in LinkedIn, and that's not good. I believe the challenging pieces like the LLLM thing and how we're all beginning to feel and see that these posts, some of these posts don't feel like us. But we're smart people, and so we're going to figure out how to move past that. Okay, your second question though, and that's what I want to take on. And at any point of Mantha, you can jump in and be like Jess, you are talking too much.
Let me end here. But how the heck does one do this? What is success on LinkedIn? Right?
And that is a bigger question even than why did I have engagement last year and why don't I have it this year? What is success at LinkedIn? And I think that success is being in real conversations that matter with people who have the potential to elevate the issues of concern for you in your career. There are a couple of little hacks that I always offer to people
who are trying to just get started. Okay, first of all, you need to think of your LinkedIn profile as the most important piece of what it means to be well engaged on LinkedIn, because when somebody goes looking for you, they're going to search for you. I was going to say they're going to Google you, but these days maybe they'll go to chat ebt. Who knows where they will go to find you. But the first thing they're going to do is drop your name in some sort of
search box. And one of the first things that is going to come up is your LinkedIn profile. And you would be surprised how many people just don't even bother to do the basic hygienics here. How do you want people to understand you when they find you? And that is a visual question, like are you using that little headline bar that we give you above your profile photo well, and it's also a question of the texts that you're choosing to use to describe what you're about, yoursel story narrative.
And so if you just get that piece right and keep that piece updated, you're doing the single most important thing you need to do to be successful on LinkedIn. Now I work for LinkedIn. I think they would probably be psyched if I told you some other things to do, And I will just tell you less is more, And this is a really important idea to hold.
Whenever anybody gets started.
With a new social media platform, they commit to goals they can't reach. I'm going to post every single day, and often goals that misunderstand how the mechanics of the social platform work. Here at LinkedIn, you should be aiming to post three times a week and to think of those posts like conversations, and I would say to author them yourselves, and that that is what success looks like. Now, what should your post be? It should be Should it
be a newsletter? Should it be video, Should it be a poll, should it be a Well, the answer to that comes back to how comfortable you are in different media, Right, my Colleaguesiana is so good on video. She just picks up her phone and can talk to you and you are immediately engaged. Video is probably the right medium for her. I'm more comfortable writing. I love to write, and a very long meati post that is truly my voice, even
without a strong image, will often engender a great engagement. Okay, so you get that post up and you're like, oh, yeah, how do how do I help this along?
So you probably suspect.
If you are a person who has already been trying to make use of social for a number of years. That what happens early on in the life of the post is important. That's why you're not going to post at four am on a Thursday morning, right, You're going to schedule that post for I don't know, Wednesday afternoon, because you want to arrive when people are looking, and you understand that how the first group of people respond to that post, it's gonna help that post along a
little bit. This is a basic rule of social It applies to LinkedIn, It also applies to a lot of other social platforms. But here's a LinkedIn piece that will help you out a lot. We care a ton about the conversation around the post, and we reward it. And so what that means is, it's not just Amantha that you have put up an amazing post about your podcast How I Work and this great guest you just had. It's that I follow you and noticed and I'm like, oh my goodness, you had ner.
Iye all on the show.
I really loved that, and then that you jump back into conversation. So when our algorithm notices that you have jumped in and responded to my comment, yeah, Jesse, I got him. Then it says, oh, here's a hot one, here's a healthy conversation. And that is what I will tell you. As a creator myself on the platform has been the single most helpful thing for me to help my posts find engagement.
I love that. I would love to know, Jesse, because you're on LinkedIn presumably for maybe several hours a day because of your job. Who are the people that you love following the most? Who, in your mind is producing really great content and great conversations on the platform?
So many people. I would point you to Dory Clark. I think Dory Clark is. I wonder have you had Dory Clark on your show?
I haven't, but I know exactly who she is, Yes, and I coleheartedly agree.
She is phenomenal and she really understands not just how social posting works, but what it means to be a leader in conversation on the platform. And I would let's see who else do I love? Right now?
I want to give you the best of the best. Uh.
Aaron Helper. Aaron Helper is a solopreneur in New Jersey who has built a business helping people who are independent consultants connect with each other and grow their businesses. And she has a great posting strategy on LinkedIn, and what makes it great is that she truly stewards a community that exists offline and online, and the online expression of that community happens for the most part on the LinkedIn platform.
And so each of her posts has deep conversations around the material, and the conversations in particular, move forward the set of ideas that Aaron is trying to advance, and those ideas are really related to how you succeed when you want to go it on your own. And this is particularly important, Amantha, because a lot of what I'm seeing as AI disrupts the traditional career ladder is that for mid career professionals, senior career professionals, people like myself.
Whereas the answer used to be if the job that you had went away, you were well positioned to go out and find another better job, and you should be looking for a more traditional job inside a corporation or an organization with the benefits, structure and the social safety and all the rest. And I realized in North America that is particularly important in this moment. I actually think that the far smarter move is to become an independent consultant.
We're living in a moment where companies are over rotating on these technologies, and so they are downsizing, and in downsizing, they are losing expertise, and in the next couple of years they are realizing, oh goodness, we actually needed that legal expertise or that marketing expertise. And so there is a ripe market for individual consultants who know how to market themselves, to productize, and to position themselves to be
the answers to those problems. And in many ways, whereas it used to feel like a more vulnerable position to be in because you felt like you had to be a bit of a hustler, you had to figure out your own social safety net, because things feel more precarious in general in the workforce right now, it actually feels for many people like the safer position to.
Be in, depending on your industry.
That's so interesting. I feel like it's a good segue into like, what are the skills that you are seeing, like in this strange world of work that we're in right now, that are the most critical skills And like it's such a cliche question, but I would love to hear your view because of where you see it.
The word that we have traditionally used to describe these skills is soft skills, which is such a funny word because they are so hard and if you know what I'm talking about, you know. But what I'm seeing is the differentiator is people who are able to navigate community in real life, who are able to be curious and smartphone conversationalists who are able to follow that curiosity to learn new things on the fly and evolve. And this is not a set of skills that people teach you.
There's not a course that you can take. Rather you learn them because they're modeled for you over time if you're lucky. But whereas fifteen years ago when I was working at Wired magazine and we were trying to figure out how to tell people to get ahead in the economy, we send them to coding boot camps, there is no coding boot camp for soft skills, and clearly they matter more than anything else.
Right now, I.
Love what you said, soft skills they had to learn. I often think about the importance of good judgment now, and how do you teach good judgment? I don't know, but I feel like I am using that every day
multiple times a day. You know, like we talked about AI and content, where I'll absolutely use it is thinking about headings for newsletters and kind of you know, when I'm writing a more like sales oriented piece of comms, I'm always keen to go, Okay, how can I push that hook further or how can I push that make that headline work harder? So it's actually making people open this email. And I'll work collaboratively with my AI, But I feel like I often think I'm just I'm lying
on my judgment at the end of the day. I mean, the AI is throwing up ten or twenty or however many I ask for, and all I've got is my judgment in terms of how effective that use of AI is going to be. And I think that is such a hard skill to learn, you know, without all the experience and all the just the hard yards that certainly I feel like I've put in.
Yeah, well, judgment is so much an amalgamation of taste, pattern recognition that you get through doing the reps over time, and intuition, which some combination of the three of those skills, lands and judgment. And You're right that that is the thing that we have that carries us forward, and that we have to figure out how to trust Jesse.
I feel like I could just talk to you for hours, but I need to actually be respectful of time, and you're in New York and you need to go home and have dinners. So, Jesse, I just want to say thank you so much for coming on How I Work. I've admired your work from far. I love Hello Monday, and you know, thank you for just creating such a lively conversation, not an interview. It's just made an absolute delight.
Well, thank you so much for having me.
I really appreciate it, finally getting to actually have this time to.
Connew if you. We released a bonus episode where we nerd out on podcasting because Jesse is the host of one of the top ranking shows in the US, Hello Monday, where she interviews some of the biggest in the world of work. We chat all about the art of the interview and our respective strategies for making a great one. There is a link to that episode in the show notes and in your How I Work feed. If you like today's show, make sure you get follow on your
podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the Coulan nation.