Protecting Your Company's Reputation: Dealing with Fake Employees on LinkedIn
Jad Mishrekey
Brand Storytelling Strategist | LinkedIn Marketing & Strategic Consultant | Speaker & Instructor | Digital Marketing & Growth Specialist | Founder & CEO @ 01Dot
Now, LinkedIn is one of the most critical discussion forums where a management professional comes to connect and brand their corporates. In rapid virality, many companies' managements are upset about fake employee profiles. This is because false associations can harm the company's reputation and misguide the real professionals. Realizing all these implications and being proactive is necessary to hold your dignity in your presence at LinkedIn.
Understanding the Issue
Fake employee profiles can be of many different types and come from many other sources. Still, there have been people who created fake employee profiles to boast about their qualifications or make themselves look more knowledgeable about a particular industry. At other times, such schemes come about when a competitor or a particular party sets out with ill motives. Sometimes, such an effect may even contain a massive impact in that it may even be on a company's culture while alluding to untrue things or even security implications.
Steps to Solve
1. Monitor: The LinkedIn page of your company can be kept under vigilant monitoring at different times to detect unauthorized profiles. This would work as a proactive measure toward the early detection of fake profiles.
2. Employee Verification: Develop an in-house activity to verify the LinkedIn profiles of all your employees. Send the new joiners a communication to update their profiles properly and follow the official company page.
3. Reporting Tools: Reporting tools are within LinkedIn itself. Find the fake profiles and report them. Of course, company super admins will not be able to delete these associations, but there are measures to be taken so that LinkedIn processes the actions. Here is a LinkedIn reporting link to report a case: https://bit.ly/3x6Qx3r
4. Employee Training: Train employees on the importance of having an accurate LinkedIn profile and the risks people take in assuming anything could be actual in a fake LinkedIn profile, such as connecting to a person with an unknown profile.
5. HR Involvement: HR departments should actively manage and trace employee profiles on LinkedIn. They can help to identify any mismatches and thus advise employees to update their profiles.
Conclusion
Indeed, LinkedIn has remained a beneficial tool for networking and expanding professionals, and there has been a potential threat involving fake employee profiles. Therefore, without devaluing the credibility of the education of employees and the use of LinkedIn reporting tools, companies can always protect themselves from potential threats to their brand integrity because they can consistently enforce a pure and genuine online presence. A more realistic and professional networking sphere is developed because a correctly set authentic company page will ensure one is credible.