After receiving yet another LinkedIn contact request from a complete stranger (with the accompanying over-eager email from LinkedIn a few days later, saying “hey, this connection request is still waiting!!), I asked friends on Twitter:
Why do people ask to connect on LinkedIn when they don’t know you, and have never met you?
There was a variety of responses from people about their reaction to these requests, but the majority response was definitely one of annoyance. In the end, I came to the conclusion that interactions on LinkedIn are a lot like dating.
- If you want to get to know me, spend some time on it
- Nobody wants to be part of a cult
One of the commonalities with these LinkedIn invites is that the person asking to connect with me usually seems to be just gathering numbers of connections in an attempt to look well-connected and important, often because they’re job hunting, or “seeking new opportunities”. The other people who like to gather lots of people to look important are…cult leaders. And I ain’t willing to go live in a bunker. Or connect with people who just want to gather a lot of meaningless connections in an attempt to look import. Those connections don’t actually translate into useful professional relationships, and are therefore pretty damn meaningless.
In the Twitter discussions about our feelings about LinkedIn requests received from complete strangers, one friend was an exception, and said that she was quite happy to be invited by random people to connect on LinkedIn. There’s a good reason for this though – this friend manages an events venue and professional society, so she’s happy to be able to expand her pool of contacts in this way, as each new contact could be for the potential benefit of her employer. However, myself and another librarian find these contacts from totally unknown people to be intrusive and timewasting – we have to spend time to try and figure out if we know the requester in real life, on social media (perhaps under a different name/username), or through other personal or professional contacts (both in real life, and checking by looking at the LinkedIn 1st and 2nd level connections visualisations), in order to make a decision on whether this is someone we’re happy to connect with. As we work for a public sector body and a private commercial law firm, connecting with complete strangers is of no real benefit to us or our employer, and doing this checking just wastes our time. And timewasting means we get annoyed, refuse the request, and remember that the person asking to connect had been acting inappropriately. Making people annoyed with you, and remembering your name as someone who acts inappropriately online is not really a good thing!
Otherwise, if you want to use LinkedIn in an real, professional manner to develop your professional network, I’d suggest you avoid using that quick-and-easy-and-annoying connection request option to mass spam strangers, and restrict your connection requests to people you’ve already met in some form, whether in person or online. If nothing else, by doing that you’ll at least avoid aggravating a lot of people you don’t even know!