Summary:
LinkedIn tells you not to invite people you don’t know, but they don’t make the punishment clear, and it’s harsh. If 5 people say they don’t know you, you get blacklisted, and you can no longer invite people by name.
Others have written about that part, and I will write about it in the future, but in this post, I’m going to address something no one has written about – how do you find out WHO said “I don’t know this user” to your invitation. Update – LinkedIn removed this feature, so it no longer works.
Details:
If you send an invitation to someone on LinkedIn, they have the option to Accept, Archive, or say “I don’t know this user”. If just 5 people say “I don’t know this user”, you are put on the LinkedIn blacklist, and LinkedIn won’t make that clear to you. Instead, you would be asked for an email address every time you want to invite someone in the future, which is particularly annoying when you’re trying to get in touch with
- college friends
- high school friends
- childhood friends
- sales contacts
or anyone else you haven’t seen in a few years.
Here’s how you find out who IDKed you, i.e., who said “I don’t know this user”. This just changed in mid-March 2009, and became more difficult, but I have a clever, cutting edge solution.
- This no longer works, but if you see a new solution, let me know
- Go to your LinkedIn home page
- Expand the Inbox on the left (if it isn’t expanded) by clicking on the plus sign box
- Click Sent
- On the Inbox Sent page, click Status in the upper right to see the Invitations that you’ve sent
- Now you want to look for the status “Doesn’t Know”, but it will be in alphabetical order in the middle of the following:
- Accepted
- Bounced
- Doesn’t Know
- Expired
- In Progress
- Pending
- Replaced
- Sent
- At the bottom of that page, it will say
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 …60
but it no longer lets you click directly on page 27, and the “Doesn’t Know” section is usually about 40-50% of the way in
- Here’s the clever trick
- Click on the number 2 to get to page 2
- Then instead of clicking numbers constantly until you get to 27
- Go to the URL in your address box (i.e. where it says http://www.linkedin.com/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
- At the end it will say split_page=2
- Change the 2 to a 27, or whatever page you want to guess
- Go higher or lower if you have to find the “Doesn’t know” invitations
- Now go find the people and beat them with a stick
- Then I’ll give you the names of the people that IDKed me, and you can beat them with the same stick
- Supposedly, if you get them to invite you, it eliminates the IDK, but I’ve seen at least one case where this didn’t happen.
In fairness, it’s not entirely the other person’s fault. LinkedIn doesn’t tell anyone the severity of an IDK, or the effect that it can have on others.
I will do more on this later, but this answers a question I hear regularly in my LinkedIn seminars. Now you can at least if somebody IDKs you, you can find the culprit.
Notes:
- If you have been put on the IDK list multiple times, and LinkedIn won’t let you out of it, email me at the contact email address at the bottom of the page and I’ll tell you how to get around the problem. Make sure you put “IDK solution” in the subject line
In a future post
- What to do if you want to invite people you don’t know
- My rant on the whole IDK issue