A Black woman who posed as a white woman on LinkedIn to land job interviews is revisiting her corporate catfishing experiment in a new docuseries.
After months of unsuccessful job hunting, Aliyah Jones went undercover as a white woman on LinkedIn to see if her results would change. Her eight-month experiment, captured in the docuseries Corporate Catfish: Being Black in Corporate America, revealed clear racial bias in hiring practices.
“I made that fake white LinkedIn profile out of frustration but also out of grief,” Jones wrote on Kickstarter. “Because no matter how qualified I was, how articulate, how buttoned up… being Black still meant being overlooked.”
The D.C.-based digital storyteller chronicled her eight-month LinkedIn experiment, shocking the community by revealing that her white-woman catfish profile received more recruiter inquiries than her real account.
”I was tired of not getting hired and being overlooked,” Jones explained to Refinery 29’s Unbothered. “I studied for interviews religiously, showed up on time, got stood up, traveled across cities, made it to the final round, and still got nothing. After a while, it stopped feeling like a coincidence and started feeling like a pattern. That’s when I decided to run an experiment.”
After sharing her story, it quickly went viral, drawing messages from countless others with similar experiences. Jones set up submission forms for people to share their own stories, and within a week, over 300 had signed up.
Despite pressure to repeat the experiment, she chose to honor her boundaries, keeping it “a one-time, lived experiment.” However, the response inspired her to transform the project into a documentary, for which she is now seeking funding on Kickstarter.
“Corporate Catfish did exactly what it was meant to do: spark conversation, open eyes, and create community,” Jones said.
The documentary will feature intimate interviews, visuals, and historical archival footage to examine the lived experiences of Black professionals across industries, spotlighting the emotional toll, constant code-switching, and everyday resilience required to navigate these environments. Phase 1 of Jones’ Kickstarter campaign seeks $10,000 to cover production and crew costs, following a previous campaign that fell short of its $50,000 goal and was delayed due to a series of racially motivated attacks.
With Kickstarter’s support, Jones is moving forward with plans to film in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Los Angeles, and other cities to create an unfiltered portrait of Black professional life.
“This isn’t about chasing another viral moment,” she writes. “It’s about creating something that endures: a film that speaks for us, to us, and because of us.”
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