You press Connect -- then what?

In this article we'll explore how to deal with the people you've invited to connect who have not yet responded.

This is a rewrite of an old article of mine from January, 2017. Changes to the LinkedIn user interface since then have made the original article's graphics and some feature descriptions obsolete. I was pleasantly surprised to find that old articles can now be edited and don't have to be deleted and rewritten. What follows is an update as of November, 2019.

What can you do with this information?

• You can only have so many invitations out at once, waiting for others to respond. If LinkedIn says you've hit a limit and they've blocked you from sending out more, you would need to withdraw some invitations you've made. You can do that from the browser and app pages I'll show you.
• You notice that some people you've invited to connect haven't responded for weeks or months. You might want to write them off as not interested in you, much as it may bruise your ego. You can withdraw invitations you've made to such people.
• You sent an invitation you didn't intend (total mistake, wrong person for example). Use this info to withdraw it.

As is often the case with LinkedIn, things work differently between the browser and the app. I'll point those differences out. Screenshots are from Chrome on Windows 10 and from the Android app.

Where to find the Sent invitations page on a browser

On a browser, the path to the invitations you have sent starts at any LinkedIn page topped by the horizontal menu bar. You next click My Network > See all # (or Manage) > Sent. Not so intuitively, the Sent invitations are only found within the Received invitations area. It's like a pantry off a kitchen -- you can't get to it without entering the kitchen first.

If there are no inbound invitations you haven't dealt with, See all [zero] would make no sense, so the path will be My Network > Manage > Sent.

A click on (1) My Network, leads to a display of inbound invitations. Although they are not of interest here, you have to select their page because the link to the outbound invitations only appears there. So you'd click on (2) which would take you to the Manage invitations/received page. On that page, you'd click on (3) Sent.

Note that the text at step (2) would read Manage if there were no "inbounds" to show.

?A click on Sent at step (3) above leads to a screen like the one below (assuming that there are invitations you've sent that remain unanswered).

?Note that any personalization you added to your invitations will show in this view, as opposed to the mobile app which does not show them.

You can withdraw invitations one, several, or all at a time, as seen in the next three graphics.

In the above graphic, you can withdraw a single invitation with a single click.

Several invitations can be withdrawn at once by ticking their boxes and choosing Withdraw in the blue box.

To withdraw all your outgoing invitations at once, select them all with one click and click the blue Withdraw button. Use with care -- there's a Cancel but no Undo.

Consequences of withdrawing invitations

• LinkedIn doesn't want you inviting, uninviting and re-inviting the same person in quick succession, so you'll get a warning that you cannot reissue an invitation for up to three weeks after you have withdrawn it. (So much for ease of re-sending an invitation with a personal note when you didn't add one the first time!)

• Once you withdraw an invitation, there is nothing you can see in your LinkedIn activity (at least not with a basic membership) to show you ever sent it. If you wanted to keep such information, you'd have to document it offline.

The direct URL to the Manage invitations/Sent page above is https://www.dhirubhai.net/mynetwork/invitation-manager/sent/ .

Another clue to an invitation unanswered

On the browser, the profile of a person you have invited but who has not responded will show Pending in the top card area. It will line up with the tools you can click, but a click on it does nothing.

Where to find the Sent invitations management page on mobile

The graphic below shows where you need to tap to see Sent invitations on your smartphone.

Starting at your home feed, step (1) is to tap on the two-headed icon at the bottom of the screen. That leads to one of the two overlapping views where there is either at least one inbound invitation waiting for your action -- or none.

Next, a tap on either MANAGE ALL (2a) or SEE ALL <some number> (2b) will bring up the next view where RECEIVED has the highlight. Tap SENT at (3) and you'll arrive at the desired view: the invitations you have sent that are waiting for your respondents' actions.

As of this writing (November, 2019), the smartphone app on Android does not show which invitations you sent with personal notes and which went without them. (Use the browser to see that information.)

Pending status on the app view of a profile

The mobile app works differently from the browser. The LinkedIn app might show you PENDING on the top card area or you might need to look under [MORE...] or the three-dotted (ellipsis) tool [...].

Although the graphic above might suggest it, I do not believe that the degree of connection controls whether you need to go to [More...] / [...] or not. Be prepared to explore.

What's happening to the invitations you send?

When you send a connection invitation to another LinkedIn member, several things can happen. The other party can:

1.    Accept your invitation (they hit the Accept button).

2.    Ignore your invitation (they hit the Ignore button) and stop there.

3.    Ignore your invitation and squawk to LinkedIn that they do not know you. This is sometimes called "IDK" meaning the recipient says "I don't know you." (You don't get any notification of this.)

4.    Respond with a message but not a press of Accept or Ignore.

5.    Do nothing, letting your invitation continue to wait. (I don't know of any limit to how long that waiting can go on.)

6.    Not even receive your invitation at all.

Yet another reason to personalize invitations

Notice that for invitations you've sent with personalization, the browser view will show the text you sent (and the app won't). If some time has gone by and you need reminding why you invited the person in the first place, the record of the note you sent can be a great help, so I encourage you to personalize every invitation you send.

Options when you click on the name or photo

• Click on the name or picture of the person you've invited and you'll be sent to the person's profile.
• In an earlier version of the Sent Invitations display on the browser, you could hover the mouse on the name or photo and see a capsule of the profile, including what degree of connection you had (2nd, 3rd, etc.). This feature no longer exists.

What happens to your Sent invitations depends on the receiver's response

Remember the six possible results of sending an invitation listed above?

Other party accepts (Case 1): When the recipient of your invitation connects with you, the record of it disappears from your Sent invitations list. (There would be no point to its remaining -- the work of the invitation is done.) You get a notification that the person has become your connection. However, I have seen at least one case where I invited a person to connect, they accepted, but through some glitch, LinkedIn left a Sent invitation showing -- so I withdrew it without harm.

If you personalized the invitation text, then your Messages list will have a copy of it, tied to the person you invited.

Other party chooses Ignore (Case 2): This case is one I know little about. I believe that when a person chooses to "Ignore" your invitation, the record of it is deleted from your Sent list. I have never received a notification from LinkedIn that "such-and-such person ignored your invitation to connect." To detect whether this had happened, I would have to be keeping an offline list of people I'd invited, and compare it to LinkedIn's list from time to time.

Ignore with I Don't Know (Case 3): If the person you invited makes this choice, you don't get a notification directly; if enough people respond that way, it could result in your account being restricted -- you could be required to furnish an email address for each invitation you wish to send. Some refer to this as "being in LinkedIn Jail." In a recent test (Nov. 2019), I found that the option to click "I don't know <name of person>" persists on the screen for some time (it used to flash up only briefly).

There used to be an added option where the respondent could mark your invitation as spam, but it no longer exists.

Other party responds with a Message and does not Accept or Ignore (Case 4): The person you invited wants some more information from you before accepting. They might have seen your invitation come in with no personal note and they have no clue why you want to connect or how being connected would benefit either of you. In this case, your record of the invitation would stay in the Sent invitations list, as it should, because it is still possible for the receiver to accept or "Ignore" it. Do not mistake such a message for the person's accepting of your invitation. If in doubt, check whether the degree of connection has gone to "1st."

Don't be offended by such messages. Please understand that many members observe the etiquette of having at least some exchange of intentions at the start of the connection relationship. Unless the other party prevents non-connected members from doing so, you can choose to Follow the other person instead of connecting. Doing that will add (some of) their content to your home-page feed, which might have been all you wanted from them. Look for the "Follow" option under [More...] on the person's profile.

Other party takes no action (Case 5): As far as I know, an invitation you send can stay in this state in your Sent invitations forever.

Intended receiver never gets the invitation (Case 6): There are situations where you have to supply the email address of the member you want to connect with -- either because the receiver requires it, or you're in "LinkedIn jail." If you make a typo in such an address, LinkedIn will show the invitation as Sent but the person will never get it. Again, as far as I know, this never "ages off."

This is a security feature. If you could send repeated invitations to a person, giving a different email address each time, and LinkedIn would tell you which addresses were not correct, then it would be possible for you to game the system and learn unknown addresses by trial and error. This could explain why there is a 3-week forced interval between withdrawing an invitation and re-sending.

So if you find that someone has not accepted your invitation, perhaps they never received it at all. With the three-week interval rule, you can't withdraw and immediately re-send. I think you'd do well to have a shared connection intercede for you and request the person to invite you to connect.

Cleaning up your Sent invitations list

Withdrawing unanswered invitations after a reasonable time is a good practice. Since some people are on LinkedIn only seldom, that "reasonable" time might be quite a few months. If you trust that LinkedIn is sending the other parties reminder emails now and then for each unanswered invitation, how much "nagging" do you want them to experience?

Problems with invitations

I've seen an invitation sit in my Sent invitations list but somehow the other party had already accepted -- I clicked through to the person's profile and saw the 1st icon. These instances are rare, and I chalk them up to glitches in LinkedIn's servers.

I have also seen situations where it was possible to compose and send an invitation but it would not show in the Sent invitations page. It happened while a co-experimenter and I were investigating disconnections and blocking. It would be a rare event that an invitation you send would not show in the Sent invitations list.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My request of you

Please like, comment on or share this article as you see fit. I'd enjoy hearing any reports of the interface not working the way I've seen it so we can learn together.

All my posted articles are at this link: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/sidclark/detail/recent-activity/posts/ . I concentrate on tips and tricks for using LinkedIn and I hope you will find them useful. Do understand that some articles may be out-of-date due to interface changes; now that I know that articles can be revised long after they were published, I'll be cleaning some major ones up.

Picture credits

Screenshots made with Microsoft Snipping Tool, some post-processed with MS PowerPoint and Adobe Photoshop Elements. Cover image done in PowerPoint.

A few random thoughts about how LinkedIn seems to do things

My experience with researching issues like this one (handling of invitations to connect) have left me with some observations about the LinkedIn operating style.

• You have to know "LinkedIn Speak" to understand the site. For example, the dictionary definition of ignore is "to refrain from noticing or recognizing." A synonym is "to reject." If someone received an invitation to connect from you and ignored it, I would expect that they wouldn't give it any attention -- they'd have done nothing with it -- that's Case 5 above. Yet LinkedIn puts an Ignore button up for them to push (Case 2). It could have read Reject or Decline but that would be too harsh.
• The user interface design changes all the time and not in the same way for everyone at once. People talk about new features "rolling out" to a growing subset of the user base, or a set that sometimes disappears when the feature doesn't go worldwide at all. Let's face it folks, we are the software quality assurance team.
• The browser and the app are never in sync. For example to find the Pending state when you look at the profile of someone you've invited, you might need to drill into [More...] -- or you might not. On the browser, you can see any personal notes you sent with your invitations; on the app, you can't.

So in the spirit of experimentation, try out the tips and tricks I've described above, and please let me know if you find anything not right about them. Thanks!

--sc