Friday, July 18, 2008

Back Up Your LinkedIn Contacts

Yesterday JibberJobber blogger Jason Alba posted about a situation in which a LinkedIn member (resume book writer Susan Ireland) had her account suddenly deleted for no apparent reason. She had to spend hours and hours recreating her profile and reinviting people to connect with her. Jason recommended that everyone immediately back up their contacts. It was an easy process (once I figured out that a popup blocker was thwarting me), and now I feel more secure knowing that all my LinkedIn connections are safely stored in my Yahoo e-mail address book.

Jason himself is a force of nature. He's working on his third online networking book (I'm on Twitter--Now What?). He blogs, he's ubiquitous at conferences (I was able to catch his schpiel at the Career Management Alliance conference last year in Louisville), and he's got this really cool job search organizer site, JibberJobber. You can do a lot there for free, so check it out.

2 comments:

Richard Jennings said...

Linkedin is taking off, they just made About.com's top 10 employement site list too. (alphabetical order)

http://www.careerbuilder.com
http://www.coolworks.com
http://www.craigslist.com
http://www.hotjobs.com
http://www.jobfox.com
http://www.indeed.com
http://www.linkedin.com
http://www.monster.com
http://www.realmatch.com
http://www.simplyhired.com


Here's the link to the about.com list:
http://jobsearch.about.com/od/joblistings/tp/jobbanks.htm

Anonymous said...

Here's how to back up your contact list, not exactly the easiest thing to find in Linked-In:

Click Contacts. Beneath the alphabetical listing of all your Connections, click the link called Export Connections. Under "Export To," choose a format that suits your purposes and then click Export. The pop-up box (which you have to make sure isn't being blocked) will give you the options for what to do with the export file. For now, you'll probably want to save it--somewhere where you can find it--rather than open it. Get in the habit of doing this backup whenever your list of contacts has changed enough that you don't want to lose the new contacts you've made.