Recently, I have been getting requests from people that do not know me to add them to my LinkedIn profile. Although I am pleased that people are interested in connecting with me, many times I do not know these people. In most of these cases, I expect they do not know me and have never met me, but are sending out connection requests based on some criteria that my profile has matched on. I haven’t investigated this, and do not intend to.
As a personal policy, I do not add people to my LinkedIn profile that I have not personally met and worked with. This isn’t just meeting at a conference once or twice, or one or two e-mail conversations. I want to be able to be able to comment on the personality and work of the people on that list. For me it is not an address book of my contacts (I have a contact manager for that), but rather a subset of contacts, that are individuals I have worked with either on projects, research or know very well personally.
Please understand, I am not trying to be difficult or unfriendly, but I always want to be able to know the people on my LinkedIn profile with a good degree of confidence and understanding.
