How to declutter you LinkedIn feed. Bulk remove connections.

Tired of seeing spam in your LN feed? Well, I was, so I did something about it. Especially during earlier stages of your career it might be tempting to simply connect with anyone at LN and accept all invitations. What can I say, I was there too.

This includes all the random, low-effort recruiter outreach. While I do appreciate a custom message, situations where a recruiter put work into actually approaching me, reviewing my profile and so on (such connections remained), blunt spam is, at least now, for me, considered off the limit. This often ties to seeing content you'd rather not, or content not relevant to your interests. This was happening in my case.

Other than that, I'm currently at a point in my career, where I'm not considering any new opportunities. I try to state that clearly, however some people do not respect such wishes. It adds to tiny frustrations, I'd rather not have. Yes, I'm entitled, much.

That's why I decided to do a little clean up in who I'm connected with and who I follow. First idea: go through my connections and remove ones that I'm not interested in anymore. Well, I had almost 500 connections. Good luck with that. LN does not provide a bulk remove option, so you have to do everything by hand. I checked out possible solutions. Long story short, I've found LeadDelta and their browser extension. It's awesome. I got a list of all my connections that I could filter through and do bulk operations on. It has it's own limitations (25 rows per bulk option) but still, it saved me a ton of time & effort. I filtered the connection list by phrases like 'recruiter', 'sourcer', 'acquisition', 'talent'. Then I've reviewed the list manually - I've kept the connections with recruiters I remember fondly or those who put work in our interaction. Then I reviewed all the other connections briefly. Remove connection. Yes. Done. My connections count went from ~500, to below 350. WAY less noise as I've found only handful of people produce most of spam.

Lesson here: I'd rather have few high quality, meaningful connections, people I actually know or follow, rather than just a broad swathes of folks, counting on quantity having a quality of its own.

Anyhow. Good job LeadDelta. No, this post was not sponsored nor written by chatGPT