How to export your LinkedIn connections — and find who's missing from your ATS

LinkedIn lets you download all of your 1st-degree connections as a CSV file. Go to Settings & Privacy → Data privacy → Get a copy of your data, tick Connections, and click Request archive. About ten minutes later LinkedIn emails you a link to a ZIP containing Connections.csv — every connection's name, profile URL, company, position and connection date. Once you have it, you can compare it against your ATS to see exactly which connections were never added.

1. On LinkedIn (desktop), click your profile photo → Settings & Privacy.
2. In the left sidebar choose Data privacy, then under “How LinkedIn uses your data” click Get a copy of your data.
3. Pick “Want something in particular?” and tick Connections — the connections-only archive is far faster than the full data export.
4. Click Request archive (you may be asked to confirm your password).
5. Wait for LinkedIn's email — usually around 10 minutes for connections only, up to 24 hours for a full archive. Download the ZIP and extract Connections.csv. The download also appears on the same settings page.

Connections.csv has seven columns: First Name, Last Name, URL (their profile), Email Address, Company, Position and Connected On. Three things routinely surprise people:

• Most emails are blank. LinkedIn only includes an email when that connection has explicitly allowed connections to download it — a setting that's off by default — so most rows won't have one. That's normal, not a broken export.
• The first three lines are a note, not data. LinkedIn prepends a short “Notes:” preamble explaining the missing emails. If you're parsing the file yourself, skip to the real header row.
• 1st-degree connections only. No 2nd or 3rd degree contacts, and no phone numbers, ever.

For recruiters, the export exists for one reason: your LinkedIn network and your ATS drift apart. You connect with candidates and clients for years, but only the ones you actively worked ever get added to the database. Integrations don't close this gap either — LinkedIn Recruiter System Connect matches Recruiter profiles to records already in your ATS; it never imports your personal connections. The result: a big slice of your network — people who already said yes to you once — simply isn't in your database.

Manually: export your candidates from your ATS (in JobAdder, a candidate export to CSV), then match the two lists in a spreadsheet — usually on normalised name + company, since the LinkedIn file rarely has emails. It works, but name formatting, married names and company renames make it slow and error-prone at any real network size.

Or in about two minutes: SproutAudit does this comparison for JobAdder, free. It reads your JobAdder candidates read-only, compares them against your Connections.csv in your browser — the CSV never leaves your device — and gives you the list of connections that aren't in JobAdder, each one a click away from their profile.

Got your Connections.csv? Run a free SproutAudit and see how many of your connections never made it into JobAdder. No card, no signup, nothing stored.