I’ve been seeing some curious ads for jobs lately on LinkedIn (under “____ posted a job you may be interested in”), and I’m wondering how it came to be. There are basically two types:
Type A is related to one field I’ve been thinking of going into. It’s not related to my current expertise exactly, but the field is growing rapidly and there is a lot of demand for people with qualifications similar to mine. I’ve been doing a lot of Googling about it (and checking other sites like Glassdoor for salaries), but don’t believe I’ve looked much on LinkedIn, although it’s possible I’ve searched there once or twice.
Type B is a completely different field. I’ve been Googling a few companies in this field and their products a lot recently, but for completely personal (not professional) reasons. I definitely have never searched on Linkedin for these companies, their industry, their products, or anything related to them. It is extremely unlikely they would be interested in me as a job candidate, and whatever tenuous connection I can imagine, I definitely would not be qualified for the jobs that have been advertised to me. However, it is not only the exact same companies I’ve been looking up whose postings LinkedIn has directed to me; bizarrely, it’s the divisions of those companies responsible for the exact products I’ve been looking up. Their job postings come up frequently, so I don’t think it’s a concidence.
Now, I can vaguely understand A. As I said, my qualifications may look good on paper for these jobs, which are in a burgeoning industry, and I may have even looked on LinkedIn once or twice (strangely, I get more postings for these than jobs in my own field). However, B I absolutely do not get. The only explanation I can come up with is that LinkedIn somehow has access to my Google search history and can correlate it to my account, which seems very unlikely. Are there any other possible explanations I’m missing?