I’m puzzled by LinkedIn searches I’ve been getting

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’ve got a LinkedIn page. I’m not very active on it.

One of the LinkedIn features is that you can search other people on it. And when other people search you, you get coy little notes about “someone from ABC Corp searched you this week.”

If you pay for the Premium edition, LinkedIn will give you more info on who was searching you. But I’m skint and don’t pay Premium.

However, I am getting curious about some of the searches.

Some are obvious. Other lawyers in my province or elsewhere in Canada, sure, makes sense that they would check me out.

Canadian financial / retirement planning firms, also can see why I’d get searched by them. They think I’m an elderly lawyer with gobs of cash. [Narrator: they’re wrong.]

But why am I getting searches from people who work in:

  • engineering companies from Latvia, New Zealand, and trans-national?
  • technology executives clubs?
  • an accounting firm in Shanghai?
  • railway engineers in Pakistan?
  • Northrop Grumman?
  • Amazon?
  • Deutsche Bank?
  • a “global tech enabling company” in Hong Kong? (I don’t even know what that means)
  • Irish land planning firms?
  • a software engineering, consulting and outsourcing firm in India?
  • an Australian bank in Melbourne?
  • a law firm in Sydney?
  • Citi Bank in New York?
  • Auckland University of Technology?
  • Islington borough council in London?
  • a wholesale building supplier in Yorkshire?
  • a London chambers set, heavily stocked with silks?
  • an American company that builds auto transmissions?
  • an English engineering company in Surrey?
  • SpaceX, for God’s sake??

To be clear, as I have mentioned many times on these boards, I am a techno-peasant. So the large number of searches from people at tech and engineering firms around the world is baffling. Nothing in my professional practice points to any connection with knowing any tech or engineering.

And large law firms in London and Sydney?? I’m just a barrister with a Canadian practice, m’lud, nothing touching Australia and the UK, or international commerce.

And these are apparently searches from people? unless an algorithm is suggesting they search me? but why would an algorithm think I’m an engineer/tech bro with a sophisticated international law practice? [Narrator: He’s not.]

It’s all very puzzling.

2

I once had a LinkedIn profile. I got zillions of those connection request from people I’d never heard of, at companies I’d never interacted with, in specific areas of technical proficiency that I knew nothing about.

I never connected in any meaningful way to folks actually doing what I do, or seeking same, so I tried to disable my account — but at that time I could not find how one does that, so in frustration I removed all my descriptive info and contact info and changed my profile name to “nobody home”.

For the next two decades, up through present (even though I eventually figured out to delete my account), I get emails with salutation lines “Hey Nobody, please endorse the worker Joe Blow at Widgets-r-Us”

3

Example:

4

Now I’ve been searched by someone at the US Air Force Academy, and by someone at Northrop-Grumman.
?!?

5

Just a WAG, but if someone searches for “John Smith” and you are one of the many John Smiths who come up in the list, might that count as someone having searched you?

6

Note that LinkedIn doesn’t do any verification that someone actually worked for the companies listed. So there’s no way to know if those people really work at Northrop Grumman, etc.

7

I think these searches are almost entirely for two reasons, and the above is one of them. Your profile is probably coming up in search results for similar names.

The other would be searches on something other than your name. You might come up in searches for people who worked at ABC, or who went to school at XYZ. Or it could be keywords from your profile or any posts you’ve made.