Why and how to remove some bad Linkedin connections

I heard last week that there are now close to 7 million people in Australia and New Zealand on LinkedIn. As a Career Coach and an active LinkedIn user, I do keep getting requests to connect with lot of people. While majority of these are genuine, in a one off, rare case, someone connects with you on LinkedIn, only to follow up and connect with everyone you are connecting with, for themselves. And not only that, they start spamming all your connections, new and old ones, with junk offers! Sometimes they are just online trolls or lurkers. This is irritating as other genuine connection requests suffer.

While LinkedIn have created good standards and safety protocols for connecting and it’s really difficult to beat the system, sometimes you tend to connect with someone in a hurry, who says they would like to get connected just thinking it should be ok. Especially if your email id is public knowledge this happens a lot. I am suggesting don’t do that, please wait and check.

Do you know this person? How and from when? What does the profile say about this person? Does their work history look ok? 4 lines of work history and 2 words in a vague job title with no company name? Sorry that doesn’t sound good to me. There is no photo as to the identity of this person and it seems a v common name or just some initials? Verify, get more details or steer clear. What does the location of this person say where they are? Do you have any connections/groups in common with them? That’s safe and comfortable situation. Do they have any recommendations? Has someone you know or your connections recommended them? Please check how many connections does this person have? 5 0r 20? Or over 100? While there is nothing wrong with having just 20 genuine connections, I would feel comfortable connecting with some who knows a few people, after 10 years within the industry. Or at least mention openly in the email where or how they know of you or why they want to connect with you.

Firstly safeguard your connection list in your public profile settings, so its difficult for access your connections easily. Secondly, under extreme conditions, you can also mention in the summary itself that you would not be connecting with totally unknown people. Some people mention this, but it is a rare and temporary thing to do.

But how to remove bad connections? In case you have connected with someone by mistake and are unhappy about it, what to do? Well you can remove them from the connection list. Go to the profile of this person, click on the drop down box from blue button and click the appropriate option