You know, I often talk about staying connected with people and how that's not only important
when you're in career transition or looking for another job, but it's also important just for your
career development. Something that I do at least once a week. In fact, I have it on my day planner
called “Connection Day.” I usually set aside Wednesday to do this, and I don't spend a lot
of time on connection day, maybe only about 30 minutes in my day, but I call it Connection Day
is I go to my LinkedIn and I reach out to someone and reconnect with them that I haven't
been connected with or kind of lost touch with over time.
My name is Bill Benoist. I'm a certified professional career coach here in Silicon
Valley. And I want to share this strategy with you because I think it's a really good strategy.
And I also want to share with you one of the challenges that I have and how I've overcome this
challenge and can actually with what I've done, working your benefit. So, if you're like me, you
probably have quite a few LinkedIn connections. I mean, really anything over a couple of hundred is
quite a few. Um, I've seen people with thousands of LinkedIn connections personally, I have about
1400 connections, but where I'm going with this is if I want to reconnect with someone who I had been
out of touch with for some time. Well, it's kind of hard to remember who that someone might be.
So there's a great little tip that you can use a little strategy and that is
exporting your data out of LinkedIn, all your connections, the information on these connections,
putting them into an Excel spreadsheet, and then essentially manipulating that Excel spreadsheet
any way you want to go ahead and zero in on these people that maybe you want to reconnect with.
So not only is this a good idea for people that are in career transition or looking
for another job, but even individuals that have started their own business out there and maybe
want to take a look at who could be potential, um, clients that they could reach out to. So
let me show you how this is done. And this is a really quick video. You'll be surprised just how
easy it is to get your data out of LinkedIn into an Excel spreadsheet. What I've done is I have
signed in my LinkedIn of Karen I'm on my homepage. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go up here
on the tool bar and I'm going to select the me icon. That's what I call it, the me icon,
because it says me and it has a little picture of my LinkedIn profile photo. I'm
going to click on the down arrow and then I'm going to go into settings and privacy.
And by default, I'm going to be on the data privacy tab here, but there's a number of
other tabs that I really am going to encourage you to just get familiar because
There's some important stuff in here. But for right now, what I want to do is I'm going to go
into the data privacy tab, which is the default that we landed on. And it's the second item down,
get a copy of your data. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on this change right here. I
don't know why they don't just call it. Yes or no, but it says change, but I'm going to click on this
and I can either select something specific that I want, like all the articles out there, or the
imported contacts or invitations, but I'm just going to get everything. I'm just going to get
everything. So, I'm going to click on that and then I'm going to hit request archive.
And I want you to notice something says your download will be ready in 24 hours.
So I'll go ahead and click on this. And then I need to put in the password of my LinkedIn
account. So just go ahead and put in that hit enter. And I'm not going to say that
and request Pitney. So it says it takes about 24 hours. You know, when I did this, I'm going
to go ahead and skip ahead. It usually takes me anywhere from maybe 30 minutes to an hour.
Okay. It's been about 45 minutes and I just received this email. Let me read it to you.
Hi bill. Here's just the first part of the information we have archived for you, including
things like connections, contacts, messages, and profile information. You can download the first
part of your data archive with this link. That's an actual link there within 24 hours. You're going
to get an email with a link where you can download the second part of your archive. It will include
your activity and account history from who invited you to join to the last time you logged in,
want to see the full list of what's included, just visit our help center. I'm only interested
in my connection. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to download this first part.
So, this takes me right back over to LinkedIn, to where we were before
and the data privacy tab you see. Now, this has changed from request pending
to download archive. So, I'm going to go ahead and click on this little blue button
and I can see it just downloaded it right here at the zip file. So, let's go ahead and go into
this zip file and click on that. And here it is right here. Let's see what it's opened up.
All of this information. Let me go and close this. Let me
make that a little bit bigger. Okay. Look at all of this stuff here that we got. This is
all the information that was in LinkedIn. At least part one. Actually, I think this must be
part two as well, because I mean, it has all kinds of things in here. Job applications,
job seeker, preferences that I've put in over the past already calls downloaded.
But what I'm really interested in is the connection. So, let's just take a look at this one
here, but you can go through and play with this all together. So, this actually opened up my Excel
account, but this is a C S V format. I'm going to put this. Let's just separate these tabs. So,
it's the first name, the last name, email address. We can come back to that in a second
company position title of the person and when we connected on, okay, so let me talk about this,
this one column here, email address. You're not going to be able to pull very many email
addresses, unfortunately from this. And the reason why is LinkedIn actually turned off that feature.
It turned off the feature, allowing people to capture email addresses. So,
the only way that you can capture an email address is if that individual
purposely turned on this feature to allow people to get their email addresses.
And that's in that settings that we were just in. So you're not going to get a lot of this, but let
me show you what we can do. So, we've got column a column B column C column D column E column F let's
take a look at column E the position I'm going to do. I'm going to just highlight these columns
right here. And I am going to go up and click on data, and then I'm going to click on sort,
and as soon as sort by column E, I want to look at the positions,
okay, what do we have here? I want you to just go through and take a look at this
business owner, CEO, chief executive officer co-founder
directors, a little bit, all the directors there.
I have a lot of executive coaches first vice-presidents founders. If you were in
career transition, or you were looking for a new job, would this not be helpful for you?
Would this not be helpful for you? If you were a business owner and you wanted to sort out and
just get a list of people that are the CEOs that you're connected with or the founders,
but what if you're in career development and you just want to stay connected with
individuals? Then what about this? What if we highlight everything? And instead of sorting
on column E we'll go up here and we'll sort on column F this is what I do. You know, I connected
with this person back in 2014, 2016, 2017, I could take a look at some of these individuals here and
notice that you know what, there's some people that I do know quite well, but I haven't talked
with them in a long time. And this kind of helps me with this, but you can sort this any way that
you want, that can help you with your career search or your career transition or your career
development, or again, if you are a business owner and you want to reach out to individuals.
So this was a quick video today, but I do hope you found it informative and useful.
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hit the bell notification as they do upload new career tips and strategies every Tuesday.
And I'd hate for you to miss anything. Thanks for stopping by. And I will see you next week.