I have a habit of adding everyone back on LinkedIn. I only made my account last year (around this time), and I am grateful for all the random Boston University students that added me back when I sent out those I-don’t-know-you-but-we-go-to-the-same-school connection requests. When I get LinkedIn requests now, almost all of which say “x mutual connections,” I always add them back. This is a contentious issue in LinkedIn usage—some people say to never connect with someone you don’t know. Well, I’m Team Connect with Everyone because how else will you meet new people and grow your network?
When people talk about ghosting in the professional world, it’s usually in regards to recruiters and companies who ghost applicants. So many people complain about never hearing back after applying to a job or interview. But what about ghosting LinkedIn connections?
A while back, I had seen women on LinkedIn write about how frustrating and disrespectful it is when they get hit on via the platform. LinkedIn isn’t designed for dating, and when people reach out to you just to call you pretty and not to discuss any of your content, qualifications, or anything even remotely professional, it’s incredibly annoying. This has become a bit of a meme—young professionals joke that they only accept pick-up lines on Instagram, and they go out of their way to highlight that LinkedIn is not a good place to slide into DMs for those purposes. At a leadership conference I went to earlier this year, I met a guy who added me on LinkedIn and then asked for my number over messaging.
My LinkedIn messages are pretty full, and most of them are from well-meaning and like-minded people who just want to talk—which is great. But I also get a lot of DMs that are grammatically incorrect in a bot-like way, open with calling me gorgeous and then asking me where I’m from. A few offers that my friends and I have received even seem eerily similar to multi-level marketing schemes.
It feels weird to ghost on LinkedIn, but I do it sometimes. When someone congratulates me on a work anniversary and then takes my thank you message as an opening to spam me with personal questions, I ignore them. Other times, I get repeated messages about certain services people are offering. It’s nice when they back off after I fail to express interest, but some of my connections just keep going, and I ignore those too. I used to return every single LinkedIn message, but I realized that that was just encouraging certain accounts to keep messaging me. I haven’t deleted any connections—I’d like to think that they mean well and they just happen to want something different from I want—but ghosting them has proven to be a pretty effective way of ending the flood of unwanted messages into my DMs.
Have you had to ghost anyone on LinkedIn?
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