When presenting LinkedIn seminars to groups of job hunters,
I’m often confronted by attendees who are highly skeptical about the whole social/sharing experience.
“I only will connect with people I know well,” someone will defiantly contend. Piling on, someone else will often ask in a show of can’t-be-bothered defensiveness: “Why do I want to give information about myself to strangers?”
Nonetheless, there are measures to protect yourself that you can reasonably take. Most important, however, is to jettison the “I’m going to protect my
contacts” and “I’m not sharing what I know lest it give someone else an advantage” mentalities. This is the age of connecting and social sharing. To be sure, there is legitimate reason to have a healthy skepticism of strangers.
Because my articles here on job-hunt.org, USNews & World Report and elsewhere give me wide exposure, I typically get several requests a day to link to people who may know who I am, but of whom I have absolutely no knowledge.
Bear in mind,
you don’t need to have an “all or nothing” policy of connecting with strangers. Use common sense about which invitations to accept or reject.
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