Here is the latest news in this saga. Being a cranky old SOB I am not predisposed to let this lie, so I have chased this story a little further. First, to close off other possible explanations I have confirmed with my mystery contact that she did not have me in her address book or any other reference to me on her computer. She also confirmed that she never performed a search for me on LinkedIn. That leaves my wife’s Facebook account as our only electronic connection.

Then I re-opened the issue with LinkedIn customer support and asked them point blank whether they used any external data that users did not explicitly provide to LinkedIn. Here is their reply: “I can assure you that we do not obtain any information outside of one’s Linkedin account.” They suggested an e-mail address connection that was granted by my contact. I wrote back indicating that this was not the case and asked them to explain the specific data used to infer this connection. That was two weeks ago and I have not received a reply.

I will send the question again, but they can decide to ignore me again if they choose. Jason, do you know of any way that we can spread this issue a little further?

Man, this is so basic!

If you’re jazzed and excited about a new gig, and you *don’t* update your profile, what message does that send to your new/former colleagues?

More than anything, realize that recruiters and hiring managers often COMPARE your resume and your LinkedIn profile (often as a way to find out what *else* you’re doing/have done that you :cough: conveniently :cough: left out of our phone conversation with me)

I strongly recommend that you ensure your resume (including dates) is in sync with your LinkedIn profile.

$0.02

Thank you for another very useful article.

I see that under Engineer Manager/Senior Software Engineer, Mr. Allen writes, “Assisted Principle Engineer…” Since you describe Mr. Allen as a local friend, you may want to point out to him that a principle is a fundamental truth or proposition, an idea. Mr. Allen assisted the Principal Engineer, the Engineer with the highest authority, the Head Engineer. Spelling mistakes like this one can seriously undermine an otherwise well-written profile. Using the Spelling and Grammar Tool in Word and letting other people read over our material before posting it can help us avoid this kind of error.

Again, thanks.

My “yellow flag moment” came to the ratio… I don’t advocate getting tons of Recommendations, but if you have a large network without many recommendations I wonder if you didn’t just go to one of those “get tons of connections fast – even though no one knows or cares about you!” places …

My only disagreement is that too many recommendations looks too cheesy–like you are trying too hard. Recommendations is all about quality not quantity.

Some people leave what their last role was, others put up a fictitious company and say they are a consultant… for example, I might put Marketing Consultant or Marketing Freelancer @ Alba Consulting…. make sense?