Have you ever encountered the problem of fake employees? I did. You see, I was the admin of several company pages a couple of years ago and maybe that was the reason why I couldn’t check the employees’ section of all of them that regularly. One day I decided to have a look at this part and explore the employees of each company page, and what did I face? Correct, fake employees, and not like one or two. I remember clearly that one of those pages, which only had 23 real employees, was listed in 368 users’ profile experience section! That was time for me to learn how to remove employees from LinkedIn. Unfortunately, there was not a way for the admin of a company page to remove the employees, and it still is not possible. So what to do?
We will talk about how to deal with fake employees on the LinkedIn company page, but first, let’s say why does it matter?
What is the problem with fake employees?
Why is it a problem? Well, there are several issues in that matter. First of all, it can deeply affect your brand image. I mean think about those potential customers who visit your page and decide to have a look into your employees’ section.
The fake employees can be from any field of work and have any level of education. It is fine of course to be educated at any level but still, if you have a tech company and have an employee who did not even finish high school, this can lower your brand credibility.
Also, irrelevant people can make you untrustworthy, for if I have a beauty product company and have mechanics or musicians listed as employees under my brand, people will doubt if I even am a real brand or not, and many marketing chances will be lost.
The other issue is for the bigger companies and more popular brands. You see, the recruiters usually don’t care that much for the older positions a candidate had and they do not really check the information given in a resume with all of those mentioned companies.
That makes a perfect opportunity for some people to make a pure fictional experience section and claim that they used to work for some big-shot companies. What happens if they are not as good as they claim to be?
Will it not decrease those brands’ credibility? Sure it does, but maybe not that drastically for 10 to 12 people, but what if the number goes up to hundreds? That will be an issue for sure, even for companies like Apple, Microsoft, Dell, etc. and there are many other issues as well. What should we do in this situation?
How to remove employees from LinkedIn?
It’s not like everyone who is listed as a fake employee on your company page has done it on purpose. Most of these cases happen unintentionally, especially if your brand name is similar to others. Not everyone checks to see if they listed the correct brand under their experience section.
There are some remedies for this matter. First, if those fake employees used to work for the company but didn’t update their experience after leaving, a gentle reminder for them to change their position would do the trick.
It also applies to situations where one or two users have listed your company in their experience section by mistake. Another way is to go to the contact us section and fill the form to edit the false information on your page.
This way is not that fast but so accurate, you know there are less than a hundred people on the LinkedIn support section and 55 million companies and more than 830 million users on the platform.
The last way that I can think of is doing a rebrand. A minor rebrand can do the trick if you think there are many similar company names to your brand on LinkedIn. You know that when your rebrand the company name does not automatically change in the employees’ experience section and they are to do it manually, right?
So make a little change and ask your employees to change the company in their profile. Although it is a bit risky, for customers might not be able to find the page on LinkedIn, but it can solve the problem, and then all you need to do is to claim the new name in your other social media accounts and ask the employees to do so.
Also, the website can be a great way to tell everyone that you made a rebrand. Do you see? All you need to make the fake people go is to know how to remove employees from LinkedIn, which you do now. So if you are struggling with this issue, use the mentioned ways.
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