Had an interesting chat with a recruitment agency earlier this week regarding their consultants and LinkedIn. Firstly hats off to them for pushing the use of LinkedIn as hard as they are, it’s a recruiters gold mine if you engage and use all aspects of the site/network, we receive a lead on average once a week currently from our efforts.

What was an interesting topic of discussion was “Who owns the 1st level connections that each consultant builds as their efforts on LinkedIn, the Employer or Employee/Recruitment Consultant?

This particular recruiters feels that all of the work that is done to either build an online or offline professional network during business hours, representing their company to promote their services, and thus connecting to that individual/s is the property of the business. I can certainly understand where they are coming from however is it that straight forward?

What of proof of time of connection (where they at the current employer when they connected on LI), can any company really stipulate that they own every person that their employees come in to contact with, and is this just taking the rules to far with internal business information and knowledge. Considering a LinkedIn account is represented by an individual, under their name, what ownership can a company have? Quite often you connect with more then just professionals in your industry, how can we really define or argue the two?

Now I agree that a LinkedIn network is certainly an asset, and once an employee leaves that asset is lost, however that person still needs to be replaced, with, you would expect, a potential new asset to bring with them. Can you really prove or is it realistic to ask an employee to prove their network and when they connected with them?

What are your thoughts? Should companies have the ability to “own” the employees networks either on LinkedIn or Twitter and demand they are deleted or similar once their tenure has ended?