Do You Blindly Accept Connection Requests on LinkedIn?

Do you monitor your reputation on LinkedIn? If not, you should.

I have found several profiles on LinkedIn of members that have created profiles indicating they have achieved renowned employment status and are at the peak of their field, with a PhD in some field, only to discover they claim a PhD from a university that does not issue a PhD in that field. I have even have people claim to have gone to high school with me and were in my graduating class. (Note: I know all 15 people that were in my high school graduating class.)

At first glance the person trying to connect with you may appear to be a tempting profile to accept and be associated. Don’t just accept invitations blindly, do your research first. It may be tempting to accept an invitation from the Chairman of the Board of XYZ Corporation, a large multinational corporation with an impressive PhD in Economics. However, look deeper and ask some simple questions:

1. Do you know this person personally?
2. How did this person find out about me?
3. Why does the Chairman of the Board or CEO of this company, want to connect with me?
4. Who does this stranger works for, and does the company have more than one employee?
5. Is the person in sales?

You may be wondering why this matters? So what if a total stranger wants to connect on LinkedIn with me? Won’t that help bolster my profile?

In my experiences I have identified three reasons why you should be careful of blindly accepting invitations to connect. They are Reputation, Reputation, and Reputation! Not to mention that you will most likely receive a sales pitch shortly after accepting the connection.

It may be tempting to have some CEO from a company you have never heard of to bolster your connection profile; however, it also works the other way.

A member with no credibility in a field can easily create a profile and dupe members into connecting with them. After all, in this social network gone wild Internet world people want to be connected.

With each new connection the "phony" profiles network grows, allowing him to contact more and more people. Eventually people tend to see their friends or business acquaintances as connections to this phony profile. As a result they tend to think, “Well if he knows so-and-so, then he must be a reputable person” and more people accept invitations from the phony profile thinking it is the CEO of XYZ corporation.

Before you know it, people are sending resumes to XYZ Corporation; providing more information the perpetrator can use to bolster his phony profile. Suddenly this unknown individual with the phony profile is the member in which everyone in your circle is connected.

Before long the phony profile is now second to none, and boasts a list of credible social connections. Now that the phony profile has reached a level of presumed credibility, the owner can easily start using the profile to obtain contract work, gain an in with your friends and associates and maybe even drop your name to start a conversation.

And what does this have to do with you? Well your connection served has a solid reputation by association. Your hard work, years of education, and forging of professional relationships can easily be used to assist this person in multiple ways.

Okay, maybe the person that created the phony profile isn’t planning on world domination, he may simply be some guy that is out of work and is looking for a job, but can’t seem to land one. So in a last-ditch effort, he creates a great profile and gets lots of respected members of the social network community to connect with his profile. Once it appears he has the connections he needs, he is free to start changing his profile from the flashy CEO to?a salesman. He will change his profiles, his title, and starts changing his experience. Eventually you may find him in your network connections and won't remember who the person is, or why you are connected, or he will start filling your email box with spam.

As more and more businesses are looking to cut expenses, and individual background checks can often be an expensive part of a pre-employment investigation, social media is fast becoming the first place businesses look to either recruit new employees or get a first impression of a recent applicant. As a result your profile on LinkedIn or any social network, connected to a person you never met and don’t even know, could be the deciding factor as to whether that person gets an interview for a job in which he may not be qualified.

I know of at least one instance in which a bogus profile was used to land a job and later prevented someone else from getting a job. In this particular case, it was discovered that a new employee who appeared to have all the required skills and knew the right people, was actually under qualified for the position and proved to be unreliable and add insult to injury, this person had also stolen client information from the company; he was quickly terminated. After performing another extensive search to fill the position, a very well qualified individual had applied; however, during his pre-employment background check it was discovered he was connected to the previous employee via LinkedIn and other social networks. Not wanting a repeat of the previous experience and exposure to possible theft, the employer chose to move on to another candidate.

As social networking becomes a bigger part of our lives, it is up to you to actively filter your “friends” and connections. As the saying goes, “Show Me Your Friends and I’ll Tell You, Who You Are”, reputation by association works in both directions. If you are not careful who you choose to connect with, you can easily boost someone’s reputation that does not deserve it, but you can also just as easily destroy your own reputation by association.

Managing social network relationships is different than real world relationships, and must be effectively managed. In?1992, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology Robin Dunbar introduced what is?referred to as Dunbar’s Number. Dunbar’s Number is a cognitive limit as a direct function of the size of the neocortex, to the number of people with whom one can maintain a stable social relationship. Although no precise number has been determined, it is suggested that the value is between 100 and 230 relationships.

Considering that it is not uncommon for a user of LinkedIn to have in excess of 230 or even more that 500 social connections online, the human brain does not have the capacity to maintain intimate knowledge of everyone to which we connect. As a result, we rely on the grouping of?relationships, if a person requesting a connection is also connected to someone you know well, it is easy to assume that other person knows them or has done the research, so you simply accept the invitation. We then rely on LinkedIn to do the remembering for us, thereby reserving that neocortex for more important relationships.

So the next time you get an invitation to connect and you don’t know the person requesting the connection; stop, think, research, then decide. After all you would not hand your wallet, and credit cards over to a complete stranger simply because they asked for them, so?why hand your reputation over to a complete stranger with total disregard.

Take the time to do your research, and make your list of connections a valuable list, with real connections. When the time comes to use your network, you will be gland that you did your homework, and built a network of real people with real skills and impeccable reputations.

I personally vet every connection request I receive, and routinely review all my connections. For me to connect with someone, they must be in a field I am interested in, and there must be a purpose to the connection. I receive connection requests everyday from complete strangers, and 90% of them are rejected. As a result I have built a network with real value. This does not mean that I won't connect with people I don't know personally, after all it's good to have friends in high places. Just know that I will do my research, and if I do connect to you, then I believe our connection has value.

About the Author

Jay LaBonte is the award-winning author of the bestselling book,?Your Guiding Genius: Building A World Class Team.?Jay holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Information Systems and is?a Certified Employment Law Specialist. With over forty years experience managing teams of all sizes in various industries,?he is no stranger to team leadership and has raised the bar on team building.?Mr. LaBonte currently provides IT consulting services through Paradigm Systems, LLC. and is one of the foremost experts on Multivalue database performance tuning and administration. You may contact him by visiting hellophello.com/hi/jaylabonte