LinkedIn: Who’s Viewed Your Profile

One of the most interesting features of LinkedIn is that it offers you the ability to modify your “visibility” as you use the system. If you want to check out a bunch of profiles of people you might want to talk to but don’t want them to know you did, you can adjust your profile visibility to “Anonymous”. However, LinkedIn prefers you not be anonymous and penalizes you for doing so. When you set yourself to anonymous, what you can see in other people’s profiles also gets limited, often making your research less effective.

While it might be tempting to look around a lot without anyone knowing it was you, as a job seeker, this could be a mistake.

I’ve had several candidates in the past use LinkedIn to research potential employers by reading profiles of key employees in the division or department where they wanted to work. A high percentage of the time, when the person being researched realized that their profile had been viewed by someone they didn’t know, that person would then click right back to view the candidate’s profile! So, without doing anything or making any direct contact to the hiring manager, the candidate had their profile reviewed and the hiring manager then contacted several.

**A special note: LinkedIn currently restricts some profile views as a way to entice you to purchase one of the paid versions of LinkedIn. This benefit alone is generally not worth the high cost of a LinkedIn monthly plan.