Removing contacts in LinkedIn
I use LinkedIn a lot, and find it of great benefit: I’ve had people contact me through LinkedIn about working with them, and I’ve used it to find people for the same reason. I have about 350 contacts, which gives me a network of over 1.5M people who I can search for and contact directly. As with most people, I use LinkedIn as a purely business network (although I do link to a few friends on it), not as a social network. It’s like Facebook for people with jobs.
One huge problem with LinkedIn was that you couldn’t remove any of your contacts yourself, you had to email to LinkedIn customer service and have them do it for you. In discussion about this very issue last night, Mark told me that there is now a way to remove contacts: go to the My Contacts page, then scroll down to the bottom right and there’s a link to remove contacts.
This morning, I did some pruning. First, a guy who I didn’t really know but we had both worked as contractors for the same company, who later spammed me with a MLM scheme — gone. Then, everyone who had been a contact for more than a year but still only had one contact (me): these are obviously people who heard about LinkedIn from me, said “oh yeah, I’ll try it”, then never went beyond accepting my initial invitation to join. Sorry, people, but you add no value to my network, and there’s no sign that you’re ever going to start.
Next, I’ll be going after the people with a very low number of contacts who haven’t updated their profile even though I know that they have moved jobs, especially those that still have their primary email address as that at their former employer: not only is their information stale, but with an incorrect email address, they’re unreachable through LinkedIn as well.
10 Comments
This post scared me enough that I immediately checked my LinkedIn page to make sure that it was up to date, even though I knew perfectly well that it was!
Rohan, you have too many connections for me to ever knock you off my list!
Oh thank goodness, there’s a few names (like duplicates) than need to be cleansed from my list.
I wonder what they’ll think of next, say some feature to make Linkedin actually useful to me more than once a year?
[...] I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of LinkedIn. On occasion, people ask why and how I use it, so I started to jot [...]
I recently took off a contact that only had 1 connection. A few weeks later I noticed that he added a bunch. We’re both trying to re-connect but LinkedIn won’t let us. Contacted CS a week ago but no response. ANyone know how to do this?
Dog, I suggest that you ask this question on LinkedIn through the “Answers” drop-down, someone else may have experienced the same thing.
I remove contacts (especially job agents) who do not allow me to see their contacts. Share and share alike – if you have something to hide, then so do I…
Many thanks.
That was helpful. However, the link is not at the bottom any more, but a top right part of “Connections” page.
Btw. Say hello to your husband (Croatian). I’m from Croatia myself.
Thank you, this was very helpful!