How to see LinkedIn profiles without leaving a trace

When you visit other users' profiles on LinkedIn you leave a trace of your passage. With a simple trick, however, you can look at profiles while remaining anonymous

If used well, LinkedIn can actually be a useful tool for finding work or, at any rate, useful information for your professional career. Many companies are now on LinkedIn, as are many of their employees with their own personal profiles. These profiles sometimes have to be managed by the employees following a detailed policy, in order not to damage the image of the company.

This makes you understand that LinkedIn is actually the place to look for or give professional and work information. One of the many possible uses of LinkedIn, for example, is to "peek" at some profiles that may be useful to you. If, for example, you would like to apply for an open position in a company that is currently hiring (or propose yourself, spontaneously), all the information you find on that company can be useful during the interview phase or, even before, in the drafting of a motivation letter. If you can find the profiles of the managers of this company, then, you have the possibility to understand which skills they focus on the most.

But if you look at their profile, the "rush" will not go unnoticed and those users will receive the notification that (also) you have visited their profile. However, there is a way, also quite simple, to look at LinkedIn profiles while remaining anonymous. To do so, you have to follow these steps.

How to watch LinkedIn profiles anonymously

To watch LinkedIn profiles without leaving traces you have to access Settings and Privacy within the menu that opens by clicking on the icon of your profile. You'll be sent to a new page where you'll find "How others see your activity on LinkedIn". By clicking, you can then choose the "Profile View Options". This is where you can "hide" to look at other people's profiles without letting them know. There are three choices available:

1) Your full first name, last name, and job as you described them on your profile

2) Your job and related area of interest

3) Anonymous LinkedIn member

What changes if you use LinkedIn anonymously

If you set your privacy as "Anonymous LinkedIn member" then every time you visit a profile the social will send notification to that person who, however, will see a visit from an anonymous member that they can't know about. That is, exactly what you wanted. But there's a flip side of the coin: privacy on LinkedIn is mirrored, so if you don't show up you can't see. In fact, if you "peek" anonymously, you too will only see anonymous profiles between visits to your profile, and you won't be able to get any information about who visited your profile.