What You See May Not Be What You Get

I was checking my emails the other day and came across an email from LinkedIn with a
request ostensibly from a woman in New York State wanting to connect with me on
LinkedIn.

I have a rule about connecting on social media. I never connect with anyone on any site
until I have checked his/her profile. The interesting thing, when I checked this profile,
the woman said she had been working for a company (local to me in California) since
2017. I am closely associated with this company and know all their employees. I had
never heard of her. So I gave the company a call. They had also received connection
requests from the same person but no one had heard of her either.

The company had called and emailed LinkedIn and had been told that there was nothing
that LinkedIn could do about that. I got a confirmation on that from Kerry Rego, a
consultant on social media. She agreed that there is nothing that can be done through
LinkedIn, although suggested that I send them an email anyway. Perhaps if they get
enough complaints they will consider a change in policy.

Kerry did suggest that if companies are hiring and use social media to check on positions
an applicant has held in the past, they call the companies listed to make sure that the
information is accurate.

I further checked the name and location of the woman who (supposedly) contacted me
and could not find any information on her at all on the internet, except for a Facebook
page that has extremely limited information and no followers. So my guess is, she does
not exist.

It may be nothing important but it has made me more carefully scrutinize the things that
people say on social media pages as it seems that you can put anything on those pages
without being responsible for it being accurate. In which case I am thinking about
adding to my social media pages that I have an IQ that is 10 points higher than Albert
Einstein’s (no, really).

A tip of the glass from me to you!