Trusting Your Gut When it Comes to LinkedIn Connections
In the middle of the night this week, I woke up and checked my phone. It is a bad habit I am not that interested in breaking. That being said, I looked at my standards — weather, email, Facebook, and saw that I had a connection request on LinkedIn. I looked at who we had in common and saw that we had eight women from one of my professional groups that I interact with a few times a week in common so I chose to accept the request. I decided to check him out further because my gut was screaming for me to disconnect after just a minute of accepting the connection request. This was not my first time with these suspicions of connection requests.
Later that morning, I wrote my suspicions to the eight ladies and then reported and blocked this LinkedIn profile. If you are suspicious of a connection, trust your gut! I’m no Nancy Drew, but I can be a Trixie Belden from time-to-time and have pretty good research skills. I felt those red flags before I saw them. William Arruda wrote an article about Linkedin request scams back in 2015, but here’s why I reported and blocked him and what you can do if you suspect your connection is not a sincere connection:
Why?
When I had that gut check, I looked more closely at his connections since he only had 92 yet proclaimed he was “Former CEO of BJ private industry” (That should have been an instant WTF clue!) and had held that position for 26 years while also having two entries as a “mechanical engineer” with one cited as 14 years 4 months at a private company and the other with no years indicated at a private company. His education was listed as “Master of Engineering — MEng at University of Michigan” with five years of school for his Masters. His only other interest listed other than his university was Sara Blakely, Founder and CEO of SPANX. Finally, in his connect area where you would normally find an email or phone number had his LinkedIn profile URL.
Three Steps You Can Use to Formally Check Your Gut
1. Read through the profile as if you were doing research prior to interviewing the individual for a position in your organization. Do you believe what you are reading? Does what your reading ring true when all put together? I have interviewed many individuals over the years and this profile was very immature (See company names from LinkedIn profile) and lacking basic information such as realistic contact information.
2. Perform a reverse image Google search. It’s really easy to do and will tell you if the image is similar to others on the Internet, what websites have the image, and if the image is available in other sizes. The image of this connection was blurred in the back, but the person’s face was clear. Unfortunately, I could not find the photo, but most companies have photos of their CEOs on their websites.
3. Do an Internet search for the person or ask your connections what they know about this person. You may find that they accepted it as you first did. They did, partly because they saw each other as connections like I did.
When you suspect you have been requested to connect by someone using a false profile, you do have a few options. You can reach out to the requester and ask why they want to connect with you to see if that makes your gut feel better. You can unfollow, remove, report, and/or block the connection from the “More” section on the profile. It’s your profile, your life, and your decision.
I did let the other ladies know that morning and they took similar actions to me so we could get that profile off of our pages at a minimum. Trust your gut!
#LinkedIn #Trustyourgut #connections #profiles #LinkedIn
