Do you accept LinkedIn requests from strangers? 

It’s a question I’ve been asking a lot of folks recently. Mostly because I get them all the time, at least a few a week, sometimes a dozen. And quite frankly it puts me on edge. I immediately wonder if I’ve met that person before, and dive into my recent past, reevaluating phone calls, networking events, and email exchanges, to see if it’s someone I’ve met and then forgotten.   

The whole process can be exhausting—but now I know I’m not alone. Most professionals don’t have the time to “go through all the mental gymnastics” around whether or not they’ve met someone, and if they should accept their request, says Andrew McCaskill, a career expert at LinkedIn with more than 30,000 followers on the platform. He regularly gets 10 requests or more each day from people he’s never met. And while he will consider each one, he doesn’t accept them all. 

“I’ve got a lot of followers, and there are a lot of people that will hit me up, and I’m constantly trying to figure out how to triage it,” he says. 

McCaskill along with other career experts tell me that there is no formal blueprint for how to handle these requests, because the choice is often so personal. While some people see their network as a large net and accept as many folks as possible, others (like myself) prefer to curate who they interact with. I personally prefer to reserve my connections for people I have met in my real professional life: current and former managers and colleagues, sources, peers, alumni, and other journalists and editors. 

“A lot of people hate getting a LinkedIn connection request from a random person, because it’s a bit uncomfortable,” says Gracy Sarkissian, associate dean of Columbia Business School’s Career Management Center. “On the other hand networking is about engaging with both people that you know in your personal network, as well as people who are a couple of degrees removed. And those are the folks who have proved to be the most valuable resources during a job search.”

Neither system is inherently wrong. But for anyone planning to send a connection request to someone they’ve never met, there is one golden rule: write a short note about who you are, and why you’re sending the invite in the first place. 

“If I’m looking at a line of people who are asking me for a direct connection, I’m going to look at the note first,” says McCaskill. “Writing the note says that I don’t just want a connection, I’d like you to be my connection.” 

Read more here on whether or not to accept or decline LinkedIn requests from strangers.

Brit Morse
brit.morse@fortune.com

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