[ericmay]

Never connect with anyone you haven’t met. If a work colleague or someone is on a call and doesn’t use video, no connection either. Don’t upload and store your resume on LinkedIn. There is no reason to do so.

Also, I don’t recall where this setting is, but make the default behavior such that if someone finds you and tries to connect with you, they actually follow you instead. This cuts down aggressively on spammers because in order to actually connect with you they would have to view your profile, open the … menu, and then click connect. If they aren’t paying attention they’ll just follow you instead of connect which means you can broadcast to them but they can’t broadcast to you.

[IshKebab]

Why? It's pretty useful for connecting with recruiters in my experience, and I don't think anyone can actually do anything just because they have a connection with you.

I do ignore the connections from random students though tbf.

[ericmay]

Connecting with recruiters is mostly a waste of time, and generally anyone can just fake being a recruiter. Once someone has a connection with you they can see your extended network, they know where you work, they find out all information you have shared with on your profile, &c. The recruiter may be using you to connect with someone else. You also start to consume their content since you are connected. Better to let them follow you and then when it's time to reach out to offer you a job/send an in-mail.

Generally speaking, unless you operate at an elite level or at an elite institution, you're not getting a ton of worthwhile cold intros from recruiters.