Well, today another networking contact came back to me with a similarly frightening story from someone else about a fight they had and lost with an employer over LinkedIn Profiles ownership. Now some of you may think that the above situation may have been a random case and the issue of social media profile ownership is trivial.
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These Situations Are More Common Than You Might Think! You never know when you may be fighting this same battle when you leave your next job. Regardless, if you are potentially in a similar situation, save yourself future headaches and create your own personal LinkedIn account so that you can be found if someone does a LinkedIn search by name and company, making sure that you separate your private network of connections from your employer’s. So, in this scenario, who do you side with, the employer or the ex-employee? And for what reason? My Advice to Help Avoid This Situation Add the fact that there is a paid service available on LinkedIn, and you begin to wonder why we haven’t heard about this potential problem before.
#Who owns linkedin professional#
And professional networks like LinkedIn truly blur the lines between your “professional” network and your “personal” one. But this employee did just that, and is still facing a problem.Īs you can see, we are navigating uncharted waters when we talk about social networking. Should you have to suddenly depart your company, you want to make sure that your account is completely portable. I always tell my networking contacts to make sure that they use their personal email address, not company one, as their primary LinkedIn contact information.
#Who owns linkedin how to#
I am not a lawyer in any fashion (although I DO have advice for lawyers on how to use LinkedIn!), but something tells me 1) the company should have opened a LinkedIn account and provided the employee with a username and password to use (along with a legal agreement that ownership of the account passes on to the company when the employee leaves) and 2) because the company did not do this and merely reimbursed the employee, they do not have the legal right to ask for outright ownership of the account, although they obviously deserve access to the information in the database. It would be interesting to see if there have been any court cases regarding who rightfully owns the LinkedIn account in this instance, so that we can all confirm what the legal precedent vis a vis LinkedIn is. The company wants ownership of this employee’s social networking account in its entirety. That’s right, they are not asking for the database of his LinkedIn connections, which is fair game, but for his username and password. The company demands ownership of his LinkedIn Profile. This person decides to leave the company. What Happens to Your LinkedIn Account Once You Leave That Job? And if you don’t feel the problem brewing, then maybe you need to make sure that you don’t end up like my networking contact did. I think the above is a very likely scenario for a lot of people, not only in the recruiting industry, but in any outward-facing role (such as sales and marketing) as part of a larger organization. In order to better facilitate your sourcing activities on LinkedIn, your company starts reimbursing you for a paid account. You start inviting your network as well as new contacts to connect with you on the networking platform. After being hired you sign up to LinkedIn using your personal name. Part of your job is, obviously, building out a network. Imagine that you began a job as a recruiter. Are You Using a Paid LinkedIn Account Comped by Your Employer?
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![who owns linkedin who owns linkedin](https://i1.sndcdn.com/artworks-000050812210-dnpncn-t500x500.jpg)
The following story of LinkedIn account ownership is a true one, and as with my other blog posts, I am hoping to get your feedback as to what the “right” answer to this question should be.