# Three in ten singles used LinkedIn for dating last year. The reason is not romance. Nobody opens LinkedIn hoping to fall in love. They open it to find out whether the person they are meeting on Thursday is real. Two surveys published this year put numbers on what had been an open joke. [ResumeTemplates surveyed 868 single Americans](https://www.resumetemplates.com/3-in-10-singles-use-linkedin-as-a-dating-app-and-invite-coworkers-to-slide-into-their-dms/) aged 18 to 55 in February 2026 and found about three in ten had used LinkedIn for a dating-related purpose in the past year. [Zety surveyed 1,023 US employees](https://zety.com/blog/linkedin-romance-report) in April and found one in five had used the site to look into a romantic prospect, one in eight had ended up in a relationship that started there, and 48 percent considered information on a LinkedIn profile more trustworthy than information on a dating app. Seventy-four percent of those same Zety respondents said a romantic advance on LinkedIn crosses a professional line. Those are different groups answering different questions, so this is not a survey catching people contradicting themselves. Read together they still describe one situation: a professional network is supplying something about trust that daters want, and the same network is widely held to be the wrong place to ask for it. That gap is the finding, and it is not really about LinkedIn. ## Say what these numbers are Before leaning on them, the limits. Neither of these is peer-reviewed research. Both are online surveys run by resume-building companies, which have an obvious commercial interest in stories about LinkedIn. The samples are opt-in panels rather than probability samples, Zety surveyed employees rather than singles, and question wording on surveys like these tends to flatter the finding. Treat the exact percentages as soft. The direction is worth more than the decimals, because it turns up in two separately run samples with different populations and different questions. Note what that does not license. A minority in each sample reports doing this, not a majority, and nothing here establishes how common it is among daters generally. ## What people are actually doing there "LinkedIn is the new dating app" makes this sound like courtship. It mostly is not. The dominant use is vetting. Looking someone up before a first date. Checking that the job exists, that the city matches, that the timeline in their story holds together. In the ResumeTemplates sample, the items people checked most were mutual connections, recent activity, current employer, job title, and education. That is a background check, run by an amateur, on a platform built for something else. It works well enough to be worth the awkwardness, for a reason that has nothing to do with LinkedIn being clever. A LinkedIn profile is durable, public, and attached to a real name that former colleagues can see. Lying on it is easy to do and expensive to be caught doing, because the audience includes people who were in the room. Nobody designed that for daters. It is a side effect of the profile's actual job, which is to be checkable by someone deciding whether to hire you. ## What a dating profile leaves out, and why Now set a dating profile beside it. A dating profile is short. It is usually anonymous at the surname level. It is disposable, in the sense that deleting it and starting again costs nothing. Nobody from your past is watching it. Almost nothing on it can be checked, and nothing on it carries a cost for being false. That is not an oversight, and this is the part worth being precise about instead of indignant. Every field you add to a profile is friction. Friction cuts the number of profiles a user gets through in a session, and profiles per session sits close to the center of a business that monetizes the search itself: paid likes, boosts, paid visibility, paid access to people who already liked you. A thin, fast, low-commitment profile is not a failure of imagination. It is the correct design for that business. :::pullquote The trust people are borrowing from LinkedIn is not a technology. It is the ordinary cost of lying in front of people who know you. ::: So singles went and found the thin profile's opposite in the only large database where it already existed, and they are using it in a way its owner never intended and most of them consider rude. ## Why it is still a bad idea The trust is part real and part borrowed against something that does not stretch as far as people think. A LinkedIn profile shows a claimed employment history that colleagues have not publicly disputed. LinkedIn does verify identity and some workplace details for members who go through it, marked with a badge, but an ordinary profile is self-reported and proves nothing on its own. It says nothing about whether someone is kind, honest in private, or actually available. It is a curated career document written to impress strangers, and reading character off a job title is the same error the [feed of strangers](/blog/why-a-feed-of-strangers-makes-you-feel-like-inventory) makes with a photograph. Same mistake, better lighting. The consent problem is sharper. The other person is on LinkedIn for work. An unwanted romantic message arrives in a professional inbox, from a named account, with a career attached. Sixty-five percent of Zety's respondents said dating on LinkedIn could damage their professional reputation, and they are right to think so. A cold approach on a dating app can be ignored at no cost. A cold approach on LinkedIn cannot always be. Looking up a date you have already agreed to meet and pursuing someone who never signalled interest are two different acts. The first is caution. The second moves a risk onto a person who did not agree to carry it. ## What to do with this **Look someone up before a first date, and stop there.** Confirming that a person is who they said they were is ordinary safety, and it is the least contested thing anyone does on LinkedIn for dating reasons. That is not the same as saying most people endorse it, which these surveys never asked. Reading five years of their posts is a different activity. **Do not send the cold message.** If someone is only on a professional network, they have not said they are looking. The answer is not a better opening line, it is a different platform. **Know the limits of what a checkable profile proves.** It settles identity and employment. It does not settle character, and the confidence people report after a look tends to run ahead of what they actually learned. **Notice what you were reaching for.** If you check because dating profiles feel impossible to disprove, the fix is not a professional network. It is asking early for the things that can be checked, then watching whether the answers stay the same. ## The part we build around This post is about app economics, so here is where we sit. Bloom profiles take longer to fill in than the category standard, and the free plan gives you a set number of likes a day rather than an endless feed. Both of those cost us the metric most dating apps optimize for. That trade is the point: a profile is only worth reading if it holds something a photograph does not, and a bounded day is the condition under which anyone reads at all. We also verify inside the product rather than leaving people to do it by hand on a site that does not want the job. Bloom checks that the person using an account is the person in its photos, through a live selfie check. That answers the narrow question people are currently answering for themselves, and it is the only question it answers. Verification is not a character reference and we will not sell it as one. Who somebody actually is still takes months. That part has no shortcut, and it is still the part that matters. ## A network that does not want the job The most useful thing in these surveys is not any single number. It is that both answers are high at once: a large majority calls romantic approaches on LinkedIn out of bounds, and a substantial minority uses the site for dating anyway. Those are not necessarily the same people, and the surveys cannot tell us how much they overlap. What both groups are responding to is the same shortage. One group has decided that knowing who they are about to meet is worth the awkwardness of looking somewhere built for hiring. The other is defending a boundary that exists because the site was never meant to carry this. That is a solvable problem. It is being solved in the wrong building. Bloom is pre-launch, starting in Utah along the Wasatch Front. The only thing to do today is [join the waitlist](/#waitlist) and grow with us.