People You May Know

People You May Know technology underpins both the Grow and Catch Up sections of the My Network tab5. The Grow section helps members manage connections and find relevant people to add5. The Catch Up section looks for reasons to start a conversation with existing connections5. LinkedIn Engineering describes the aim as showing each member people they will likely want to add or reconnect with5.

People You May Know builds its suggestions from what you share with other members1. LinkedIn's Help Center gives examples of what is shared: working at the same company or in the same industry, having similar profile information and experiences, and having attended the same school1. Contacts you imported from your email and mobile address books also feed the suggestions1. Some suggestions appear as email addresses, which are contacts you uploaded who have not joined LinkedIn, and invitations to them cannot be personalized1. LinkedIn says it does not scan the content of your messages to suggest results for this feature1. More broadly, LinkedIn says it uses algorithms and the engagement data it has about members to make connection recommendations2.

On the engineering side, LinkedIn Engineering wrote in February 2024 that the system processes hundreds of terabytes of data and hundreds of billions of potential connections daily3. It says sifting through every candidate in a reasonable time is impossible, so the system uses multiple stages in which each stage narrows the pool for the next3. In June 2024 LinkedIn Engineering described candidate generation as retrieving a short list of highly relevant members to show a particular member5.

At the end of the pipeline, the final list is tuned for several goals at once, such as the likelihood that you send an invitation and that it is accepted3.

Microsoft patents describe related ideas, such as criteria like same school or shared connections, but they do not show that People You May Know uses these methods1678.

People You May Know gives members a way to control the list, and LinkedIn's Help Center explains it on a separate page about removing suggestions from the My Network page4. Once you remove a suggestion, the feature will no longer recommend it, up to the most recent 500 removed suggestions14. LinkedIn lists four reasons the section can be empty: you invited all available suggestions, you removed all of them, there are no suggestions at this time, or your profile lacks details such as current or past companies, positions, schools or industries1.