Removing Connections
March 17th, 2008 | by Jason Alba |There are a bunch of reasons to remove someone as a LinkedIn connection. It’s actually pretty easy to do… but the question I get about removing connections the most is “will they know?” For some reason we don’t want to offend our connection, we’d rather do disconnect without them knowing :p
Rest assured, as far as I know, they won’t find out unless they figure it out on their own. Here’s how you do it:
Step One: Click on Contacts from the left menu area.
Step 2: (this is where you say (duh!) Click on Remove Connections on the far right of that screen (above your list of connections).
Step 3: From there it’s self-explanatory - just check the names you want to remove and on the right is a button to remove them.
Disconnect! Declutter! Empower yourself!
6 Responses to “Removing Connections”
By Dave on Mar 18, 2008 | Reply
Any idea how to restore a removed contact? I’m trying to do this in vain to someone that I did not really intend to remove.
By Jason Alba on Mar 18, 2008 | Reply
As far as I understand, once the connection is severed, it’s gone. In order to restore it, you would need to invite that person to connect again. This could be a simple “I’m sorry, I made a mistake a I was maintaining my connection list and accidentally disconnected from you. Would you please reconnect with me?”
If I got that I’d be pleased to know that my contact was into pruning connections (even if they “mistakenly” disconnected from me).
By Dave on Mar 20, 2008 | Reply
I actually tried that, but the system does not allow me to do this as it blocks a new invitation from being sent. I contacted Customer Service and they told me that it’s severed forever and there is no restoring it (which is contradictory to the message that you get when you remove a contact).
By Thomas E. Kenny on Mar 23, 2008 | Reply
I believe to reconnect to a person that you disconnected from you need to send an invite to them via one of their other email addresses. So it might be problematic if they only have one email address registered with LinkedIn or if you don’t know which address you originally connected with them on. However asking the connection for alternate email addresses and attempting more then one may do the trick.
By Dave on Mar 25, 2008 | Reply
Thomas, I tried your suggestion and it worked like a charm. Seems that when you disconnect with someone, you’re locked out of reconnecting using of their email addresses registered with Linkedin but not other addresses. Somewhat strange but thanks for the suggestion!
By Thomas E. Kenny on Mar 25, 2008 | Reply
Dave, You’re welcome and I’m glad I was able to be of assistance.