How to find hidden person name in linkedin?

If you have a basic LinkedIn account, chances are that you keep running into those “private” and “out-of-network” profiles – as on the screenshot above – with no names, just the titles. We’ve discussed before that one can try and find the hidden name by pasting a sentence or two from the profile into Google with the hopes of finding the public profile of the mysterious person.

This works quite often, but not every time. Search engines may miss pages, miss keywords, and it takes some time for the engines to discover new results. Here is how to find the name of the person – without leaving LinkedIn. This should work for true “private” profiles as well – those that are visible only for LinkedIn members.

Step 1. Click on the nameless search results in LinkedIn and look at the URL; you will see the person’s LinkedIn ID “embedded” in it – it is a number (typically, large – close to 80 mln. for the people who joined recently). Copy the number.

Step 2. Click on this link. You don’t have to send me a message (please do, if you like, of course); the link is here for the purposes of our name discovery: Send me a message on LinkedIn

Step 3. Paste the number you have saved instead of my LinkedIn ID that you will see at the end of this link.