June 9, 2017 MOUNTAIN VIEW - In response to overwhelming demand from recruiters who prefer to invest the smallest possible amount of effort when reaching out to job candidates, LinkedIn announced this week a new feature: Enhanced InMail, which will allow users to create and send audio, video, and GIFs to profiles they have yet to connect with.

The purpose of this feature, according to a company spokesperson, is to allow recruiters to advertise job opportunities to potential hires using recordings of grunting, hooting, wild flailing, and spastic gestures in a variety of easy-to-consume digital formats. LinkedIn indicated the new product will be fully launched in the coming days, and that it will allow recruiters to magnify the intensity of irritation they already are currently able to inflict on other users with their conventional arsenal of copy-pasted dreck.

Senior company leadership admitted that, although this new direction appears to be exceptionally unconventional, there is method to their madness. After months of investigation, LinkedIn’s crack team of data analysts concluded in a public whitepaper that the semantic content of over 95% of recruiter messages on their platform could be wholly replicated by simple video or sound, such as a GIF of ferocious gesticulation or an audio recording of blowing a raspberry, with no loss of semantic information.

The company also released a video previewing advanced features which will be available to LinkedIn Premium subscribers, such as written transcriptions of InMail audio, or machine learning-generated descriptions of InMail video content. The demo video on their site showed the product perfectly transcribing a recording of a recruiter making clucking sounds, as well as deriving a description from a ten second GIF: “Man smashes keyboard with fists, then angrily gestures to sign reading: React? $$$”.

This article was originally published on AlwaysTrending, a fantastic (but archived) satire site by Matt Frisbie. Copied here with permission of the author.