LinkedIn banned SellHack, a browser plugin that claims to let users “hack” others’ profiles. This won’t stop the savviest networkers from doing exactly what the app did — without the nasty side effects.
SellHack, a browser plugin that claims to allow users to “hack in” to user profiles on LinkedIn, got a burst of publicity at the end of March. Days later, LinkedIn sent them a cease and desist letter, leading the makers of the plugin to disable its functionality on the networking site. For savvy job seekers and networkers, however, neither bit of news matters. At all.
The Truth is Lamer than Fiction
The plugin didn’t actually hack LinkedIn — or anything else, for that matter. As various outlets pointed out, all SellHack did was find an email address or two for the profile owner. Visit a LinkedIn profile, click the little “hack in” button, and the plugin sends you an email with your target’s email address inside. Wow. We are living in the George Jetson future here, guys.
The data we process is all publicly available. We just do the heavy lifting and complicated computing to save you time. We aren’t doing anything malicious to a Social website.
In other words, they wrote an algorithm that did some Googling for you. But amid all the hot-and-bothered press coverage, no one mentioned that not only can you do all of this yourself — and probably in less time than it takes to find and install the plugin in the first place — but having the email address of a person you’re not connected to is practically worthless.
There’s a Better Way
Imagine you’ve used the plugin to score the email address of John Squatpump, CEO of Squatpump Consulting. Now what? Do you email him out of the blue and ask for a job or for time to “discuss a potential opportunity?” Whatever you do, you’re certainly not going to tell him how you got his email address in the first place. And outside of the context of LinkedIn — whose simple purpose is to facilitate these kinds of interactions — any request you make will seem random and almost certainly unwelcome.
A much better strategy would be to find someone in your network who can introduce you to John via LinkedIn. There are three advantages to this:
1. A common connection gives you immediate credibility.
2. In a single click, John can look at your profile and see who you are and what you have to offer.
3. Users expect this sort of thing to happen on LinkedIn, but not in their personal inbox.
If you’re really looking to make a valuable networking connection with someone — especially one that might bear fruit in the form of a job — you should have already Googled the hell out of them long before you decided to reach out. If you haven’t researched their company and looked at their social feeds to find common talking points, then you’re not ready to make that connection in the first place.
Oh, and that sketchy plugin does sketchy things with your data, as well. From Yahoo’s Alyssa Bereznak:
The catch is, even after you’ve used SellHack, the extension is able to watch your activity on the site and collect the information of any direct connection whose page you’ve decided to visit. What it’s using this information for is unclear.
Shocker, right?
In short, you don’t need a plugin for advanced networking. All you need is Google, a willing mutual connection, and a basic understanding of networking etiquette — which, by the way, doesn’t include sending unsolicited emails to people who don’t know you at all.
Image: Flickr/shekhar_Sahu
