If someone has sent you an “I Don’t Know” (IDK) response to your LinkedIn Invitation, it is easy to find out who did it and contact them to try to resolve it through peaceful means so as to deal with the LinkedIn IDK threshold.  The more IDKs that you receive, the closer to the magical IDK threshold of 5 that will place new limitations on your LinkedIn account.

Dealing with the LinkedIn IDK Threshold Proactively

Simply go to your LinkedIn Contacts page, which will display  a “x outstanding sent invitations” message on the bottom right.  Press the “x outstanding sent invitations” link, which can be done by pressing the area where it displays “sent invitations” (the link is indicated by these two words being underlined).  The next screen will show you the status of all of the invitations that you have ever sent out and/or received!  It is pretty powerful to look at this screen every now and then and see what has happened to the invitations that you have sent out.

Anyways, if you have sent out a lot of invitations, you would have to navigate through many screens looking for an “I Don’t Know This Person” response.  But there is a time-efficient way of doing this.  All of the fields (“To”, “Subject”, “Status”, “Date”) are sortable…the default sort when you go to this screen is “Date” being sorted with the most recent invitation first.  Simply press “Status” and then it will be in order of status, either a “   “, which means that the intended recepient did not receive it, “Accepted”, “I Don’t Know”, or “Sent”.  Note that if your invitation was archived it would show up as merely being “Sent” so you cannot decipher whether or not your invitation was sent.

Once you have clicked the “Status” tab you will have to dig through and see where your “I Don’t Know” responses are…they will show up in order of recently sent date first right after your oldest “Accepted” invitation.  You can then click on the originally sent invitation which was IDKed and contact the person you sent it to.

Hope this helps you manage your I Don’t Know responses before you reach the LinkedIn IDK threshold!