Find out who has viewed your LinkedIn profile

A clever trick lets you find out who has viewed your LinkedIn profile without upgrading your account.

If you are unemployed, unhappy at your current job, or simply curious about other opportunities, then you likely keep close tabs on your LinkedIn account. Users of LinkedIn's basic, free service get some information about who has viewed their account, like so:

The above box shows up on the right side of your profile page. Click on the link and you'll see the last five people who have viewed your profile, like so:

LinkedIn is a bit cagey, however, in letting users of its free service know exactly who is checking out their profile. For starters, you are allowed to see only the last five people who have stumbled across you or sought you out on LinkedIn. And in many instances, LinkedIn doesn't tell you exactly who stopped by your profile. For example, my profile was viewed by "Someone in the Public Relations and Communications industry from Fort Collins, Colorado Area." And when I click on the link, I get a list of 10 people, with a heading that tells me "One of these people viewed your profile."

Thanks to some heads-up thinking by crafty Reddit user, you can find out who that individual is. Here's what you do: take a screenshot of the page (for Chrome users, I suggest Awesome Screenshot) and then come back the next day. It seems that LinkedIn updates such a list each day with nine new names, keeping the actual individual who viewed your profile.

Couple of things:

1. You can't have your profile set to either of the anonymous settings. You must choose to display your name and headline or you won't be able to see who has viewed your profile. These settings can be accessed on your settings page. Under Privacy Controls, click the "Select what others see when you've viewed their profile" link.

2. If your profile catches a lot of eyeballs, the list of 10 people you are attempting to return to the next day might drop off your list of the last five people that viewed your profile.

Lastly, this trick didn't work the first time I tried it. I got the same list of 10 people the following morning after taking my screenshot the day before. It has worked, however, the past two days.

Did it work for you? Let me know in the comments below.