from October-07-Disaster, IntroductionManagement

Sent Introductions Filter Introduction Management Finding Sent Introductions Before Oct 2007 After Oct 2007 LinkedIn response

Sent Introductions Filter

 

Introduction Management

 

LinkedIn limits the number of Introductions you can send to initiate contact. It's critical to manage them to ensure the most value and use out of them. Finding your sent Introductions (this article) is the first step. See IntroductionManagement for more info on the overall process.

 

Finding Sent Introductions

 

The following breaks down the process of finding Sent Introductions. Later sections illustrate how to accomplish this in LinkedIn.

 

1. View your sent Introductions, including regular, group, and OpenLink Introductions. The display should show all the Intros allotted, five for free personal account and fifteen for basic business account.
2. Filter them to display Pending Introductions only.
3. Reverse sort them by date sent.

 

Before Oct 2007

 

It was easy to manage Introductions. The Sent Introductions page only showed Intros that you initiated. A filter feature allowed users to select and display only Pending Introductions. The filtered results could be reverse sorted so the oldest Introductions were displayed on top. You simply start at the top of the list. Review each of your older pending Introductions and stop when your reach your cutoff point by date. For example, if you don't withdraw Introductions younger than a week, then there is no need to review those Introductions.

 

After Oct 2007

 

LinkedIn redesigned Introduction display in October 2007. See October-07-Disaster. After this change there is no practical way to find sent initiated Introductions. If you have 10 connections and only forward one Introduction a month, this is a non-issue. However it is virtually impossible for active LinkedIn users who regularly forward Introductions.

 

• There no longer is a way to view all Sent Introductions. Group and OpenLink Introductions are now located in Sent InMails, whereas other Introductions are in Sent Introductions. If you're trying to manage your Introductions, you must check both pages.

 

• There no longer is a way to view initiated Introductions. The Sent Introductions displays both initiated Introductions and forwarded ones. There is no way to filter or just display initiated Introductions. There is no field or indication if an Introduction is initiated or forwarded. If you're trying to manage your Introductions, you must manually scan EVERY Introduction on EVERY page to try to pick out the ones that you initiated. In my case, I forward 10-20 Introductions per day. So I have 100-200 Sent Intros per week displayed over several pages.

 

• There no longer is a way to filter Pending initiated Introductions. There is a one step sort that is worthless for this use. I have thousands of Introductions on 100+ pages. Sorting groups Pending Intros together, but it's not at the beginning or end like Accepted and Withdrawn. So I would have to hunt through a hundred pages to find where the Pending Intros are located. Plus it groups the Pending initiated Introductions with the Forwarded Intros, so I still have to manually scan each one to find the initiated ones. As I said, it's worthless.

 

• Reverse sorting by date is useless. Reverse sorting doesn't help as that displays all Intros and all statuses from the date my account started. That makes the problem worse. I don't need to see Intros from a year or two ago! I typically only need to see the ones one to two weeks (not years) old. Reverse sorting only works when only Pending initiated Introductions are displayed.

 

LinkedIn response

 

After two months and dozens of emails I've received the following official notice from LinkedIn on this issue.

 

 

So LinkedIn will NO LONGER provide a way for its members to display their sent Introductions and NO LONGER enable members to directly manage their own Introductions.

 

Obviously every change accomplishes SOME purpose. When it removes a useful feature and when a networking site can't support a core networking principle - managing Introductions - then that design is critically flawed. It is sad that LinkedIn won't admit that and that it took two months for me get an answer on it.

 

 

 

 

MarcFreedman