How to ask someone for help on LinkedIn (without wasting both your time)
I get a lot of messages on LinkedIn from people asking for help, and most of them make it genuinely difficult to say yes. The message usually gives me nothing to work with. There's no context about who the person is, no indication of why they picked me specifically, and no clear sense of what they need. Just a vague request and an assumption that I'll figure out the rest.
I want to help when people reach out. But when a message reads like it was copied and pasted to 30 people, there's not much I can do with it. This is a pattern I see constantly, and I think most people sending these messages don't realise how easy it is to fix.
The generic opener
The most common version looks something like this: "Hi, I'm doing X and would love your help with Y."
There's nothing in that message that tells me why this person chose me over anyone else on the platform. There's no mention of anything we have in common, nothing about a post I wrote or a project I worked on. It reads like a bulk message, and it probably is.
When you reach out to someone you've never spoken to, the first thing they're asking themselves is why you're writing to them specifically. If your message doesn't answer that, it gets ignored. Not out of arrogance, but because there's genuinely nothing to respond to. A shared university, a post you found interesting, a project they mentioned, anything that shows you chose this person deliberately makes a real difference in whether they engage.
Jumping straight to a call
Another pattern I see often is when someone sends a message and, before any real exchange has happened, pushes for a call.
Sometimes there's a brief question first, and then regardless of how you respond, the reply is "Happy to get on a call to discuss." You ask a clarifying question to understand what they actually need, and the response is the same thing again. The person isn't engaging with the conversation at all. They've decided a call is the next step and they're waiting for you to agree.
A call is a significant ask. It requires someone to block out time, context-switch, and spend 20 to 30 minutes with a stranger. Before asking for that, you need to give the other person enough information to decide whether their time is well spent. Most questions can start as a text exchange where you ask something specific and give enough context for the person to respond in a few minutes. If the conversation reaches a point where a call makes sense, they'll often suggest it themselves.
Pushing for a call before you've demonstrated why one is needed tells the other person you haven't thought carefully about what you're asking for, and that you want them to do the thinking for you.
Asking for free labour
"Could you review my profile and give me some feedback?"
This one comes up more than you'd think, and while it sounds like a small ask, it isn't. A proper profile review means reading through someone's experience, understanding their goals, thinking about positioning, and writing out specific suggestions. That takes real time.
If you want a thorough review with actionable feedback, hire someone whose job it is to do that. Let them do it properly, review your changes, and iterate with you across sessions. That's how you get something useful. What you get from a stranger on LinkedIn, even a generous one, is a quick skim and a couple of surface-level comments. And you can't go back to them a week later and say "I made some changes, can you look again?" because you've already used up the goodwill.
I think people underestimate how costly free advice ends up being. Not in money, but in time spent chasing scattered opinions from people who aren't invested in your outcome. Five different people give you five different takes, nobody tracks whether you acted on any of it, and nobody builds on what came before. You end up with fragments instead of direction.
What a good message looks like
Compare everything above to something like this:
"Hi Rishikesh, I came across your post on how consulting interviews are actually scored. I've been working in operations for the past three years and I'm exploring a move into strategy consulting. I'm curious about how Anvil works with candidates who are transitioning from industry rather than coming straight from an MBA. Would you be open to sharing a bit about that?"
That message works because the person has done the basics. They've referenced something specific I wrote, explained their background and what they're exploring, and asked a contained question I can respond to in a few minutes without needing to schedule anything. It took them maybe five minutes longer to write than a generic message, and it's the difference between getting a reply and getting ignored.
The underlying principle
When you're asking someone for their time, the burden is on you to make it easy for them to say yes. That means doing your homework before you reach out, being specific about what you need, and accepting that the other person has no obligation to help you. The people who get the most out of networking tend to be the ones who put the most thought into their outreach, not the ones who send the most messages.