LinkedIn Decisions- Are We Really Friends?

My favorite recruiting resource over the years has always been LinkedIn.  It offers a multitude and depth and breadth of candidates of all shapes and sizes for all sorts of weird quirky openings that I have had to fulfill.  LinkedIn also gives people a nice wow-factor when they are still in the "buy in" stage of advanced sourcing.

My favorite story about LinkedIn over all the years is my attempt to teach my partner Tony how to use LinkedIn.  We ran one search on Google with the Site command (To be covered later).  We found a list of twenty candidates, called the first two Engineering people on the list, left two messages.  Within 48 hours he had put one of the two to work for a really hard to fill spot.  The client was impressed, the contractor was impressed, Tony was impressed (and making more money) and even I admit to a little bit of surprise just how easy it was.

What I wanted to talk about today on LinkedIn though is the "Invite to connect" portion:

Assuming this is someone you DON'T know and have not spoken with, where do we go with an invitation?  Typically the rule of thumb is that sending out random invites to people is the quickest way to get banned, but lets go through the options on top.  Most people in my experience instantly click "We've done business together" by default.  This is sometimes true, but you are relying on either getting permission from them on a phone call, or just hoping that they do not click "I don't know" in a response and cause you to get red flagged.
Some people click friend.  This is my favorite ridiculous choice out of this whole list.  If you are really my friend that is fine, but if I have never met you, and you and I have never even exchanged a contact, please do not claim to be friends with me, and do not claim to be friends with other people.  I will say I don't know you, or archive your request unless your someone with a really big network!
Colleague or Classmate are nice and reliable if you went to school or worked with someone, and only in those choices should you select Colleague of Classmate.
Other is fine if you know their email address.
Ultimately, "We've done business together" is the only choice I would consider making without having permission to add someone from them directly.  At that point it is up to you to spruce up "I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn" into something respectable (To be talked about later)

_staff or die!