5 Ways to Not Get Rejected on LinkedIn

By Martha C. White

By now, most of the Internet has heard about (and commented on) the bizarre response a self-professed “passionate advocate” for people looking for work gave a young job-seeker who had the nerve to contact her on LinkedIn.

“Your invite to connect is inappropriate, beneficial only to you, and tacky,” Kelly Blazek wrote, blasting what she called Diana Mekota’s “sense of entitlement” and noting that the “green” 26-year-old job-seeker “has nothing to offer me.”

While it’s stunning in its nastiness as well as its stupidity (apparently it never occurred to Blazek, who bragged about her “960+… top-tier marketing connections,” that Mekota might share her tirade with the entire Internet), there’s a lesson for the rest of us here.

No, you’ll probably never receive a scathing reply that goes viral in response to a LinkedIn request — you’ll  just be ignored. If you’re looking for a job, you can’t afford to shoot yourself in the foot when it comes to cultivating your LinkedIn network: Recruiting software company Jobvite found in a recent survey that 94% of recruiters use the site to search for candidates. So, here’s what career experts say you should do to get potential connections to hit “reply” instead of “delete.”

1) Keep it short.

2) Play up mutual connections.

3) Don’t ask for a job.

Read more on ways 1 - 3, ways 4,5, and the complete Time article


** Bonus way - Tell the why you want to connect.  Everyday I receive connection requests and very few actually say why they want to connect with me.

Sample:  I am looking to grow my network of fellow Recruiting / HR professionals and would welcome the opportunity to add you to my network.