How to report a death to LinkedIn
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by Rick Joi Rick Joi is the founder of The Workiversary Group and author of the award‑winning book, Inspiring Work Anniversaries. |
No one wants to think about this, but eventually in most people’s careers, an employee at their company will die.
The standard HR checklists are incomplete
There are many great resources across the Internet that provide guidance on what to do when an employee dies. They provide checklists of what to do, and the better ones provide guidance on getting the subtleties right.
(The most important subtlety is don’t in any way make the family feel like you’re going through the steps of firing their loved one. Sadly, this happens more than you’d expect. And, if the employee had family medical coverage, pay COBRA for them for a while.)
We would recommend the SHRM site’s death of an employe resources as a great place to start.
Unfortunately, there’s one step that isn’t listed on the SHRM checklist, or any checklist that we’ve seen.
Once the urgent matters are dealt with, an important step is notifying LinkedIn of the employee’s death.
If no one notifies LinkedIn, a lot of people will be asked to congratulate the dead employee on their next work anniversary.
No one wants that.
If you are in human resources
LinkedIn provides three options:
Report an employee as deceased
Memorialize the employee’s account
Close the employee’s account
For the sake of helping the family and protecting your employees from an insensitive and painful reminder of the tragedy, here are the steps that we recommend the HR team take when an employee dies:
Gently inform the family of their options. LinkedIn allows people officially authorized to act on behalf of the deceased employee to choose to either close or memorialize their LinkedIn account. They can learn more about these options here. They can use this form to inform LinkedIn of their choice. You can let the family know that you will be handling reporting the employee as deceased. You understand they have a lot to process, and they can take however much time they need to make the choice between closing and memorializing.
Report the employee as deceased. Anyone who knows the employee can report their death to LinkedIn using this form. If their work anniversary is not imminent, it makes sense to wait for the obituary to be published, as that makes it easier for LinkedIn to confirm the death.
That’s all there is to it.
If you’re a colleague, friend, or relative
If you’re not in HR and reading this, perhaps because you got the dreaded LinkedIn work anniversary notification for a dead colleague or friend, then know that you can also report the employee as deceased.
You don’t have to be in HR or have any official relationship to the employee.
If you have a link to their obituary or any other indication of their death and know their former email addresses, then you can report them as deceased using this link so that the work anniversary notification doesn’t go out next year.
If you author HR checklists
Being reminded of a colleague or friends death in an insensitive, inhuman, and callous LinkedIn work anniversary reminder causes a lot of people a lot of pain every year.
Many more people will find your death of an employee checklist than will find this blog post.
Please include the steps above in your checklist and/or link to this blog post.
That small action will help many people avoid a lot of unnecessary suffering.