Is wait who? safe to use with LinkedIn?

Yes. We use LinkedIn's official API. We read your connections and posts. We never send anything without you clicking send. We never post on your behalf.

How long does wait who? take to set up?

Under 5 minutes. Connect LinkedIn, wait for your network to sync and score, and you're in. Most people send their first message within 10 minutes of signing up.

Will AI messages sound robotic?

No. Our AI is trained to write like a real person. No corporate speak, no marketing jargon. Messages sound like you texted a colleague.

Can I cancel wait who? anytime?

Yes. Cancel from your settings page in one click. No calls, no retention flows. Every plan comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Do I need a CRM to use wait who?

No. wait who? isn't a CRM. It's what happens before the CRM — turning forgotten LinkedIn connections into real conversations. You can use both.

← Back to Blog

August 30, 2026·5 min read

What's in Your LinkedIn Connections Export (All 7 Columns)

Most guides to the LinkedIn connections export were written by someone who never opened the file. You can tell, because half of them say it has six columns and the other half say seven. So I exported mine this morning and looked. 8,071 rows. Here is exactly what is in it.

The seven columns

The header row of Connections.csv, in this order:

First Name · Last Name · URL · Email Address · Company · Position · Connected On

That is it. No headline, no location, no photo, no phone number, none of the notes or tags you may have added in LinkedIn. Company and Position are the person's current job as their profile shows it on the day you export, which is the single most useful thing in the file and the thing LinkedIn's own API will not give you in bulk.

What is filled in, measured on a real file

Fill rates from my 8,071 rows:

URL: 99%. The missing 1% (77 rows for me) are "LinkedIn Member" placeholders, accounts that were deleted or restricted. Drop those rows.
Company: 98%. Position: 98%. Far better than any headline-based guess.
Connected On: 100%, formatted like 27 Aug 2026.
Email Address: 2%. Only people who explicitly allow connections to download their email appear here. Guides that promise "30 to 40%" are describing a LinkedIn from years ago.

That last line matters if you were hoping to build an email list from the export. You cannot, and you should not try; what you get instead is something more valuable for the actual job of staying in touch: who works where, right now.

How to request it, and how long it really takes

On desktop: your photo, Settings & Privacy, Data privacy, Get a copy of your data, tick only Connections, Request archive. LinkedIn also offers a "larger archive" with messages, invitations and more; you do not need it for this, and it takes longer.

My request went in at 7:12. The file was stamped 7:15. So "about ten minutes" is the right expectation. One thing every guide gets wrong: no email arrived. The notification LinkedIn promises did not come. I found the file by going back to the same settings page and refreshing, where a "Download archive" button had appeared. If you are waiting on your inbox, stop, and refresh the page instead.

Two gotchas before you open it in a spreadsheet

1. There are notes above the header. The file starts with a few lines explaining why emails are missing, then a blank line, and only then the real header row. Excel and Google Sheets will treat the first line as your header and everything looks wrong. Delete the lines above "First Name" and you are fine.

2. The URLs are percent-encoded. Anyone with an accent or an emoji in their profile slug shows up like helene-h%c3%b6binger-48b98a4 instead of helene-höbinger-48b98a4. If you match this file against anything else (another export, a CRM, a tool), decode the URL first or 1 to 2% of your rows will silently fail to match. I learned this the slow way.

What the export is good for

Three things, in order of how often I actually do them:

Seeing your network for what it is. Sort by Company and you learn where your people cluster. Sort by Connected On and you see how new most of your network is (80% of mine is under two years old, which explained a lot).
Finding who changed jobs. Export twice, months apart, match on URL, and look at rows where Company changed. That is the poor man's job-change alert, and it is free.
Giving a tool real job titles. Headlines are marketing; Position is a job. Any tool that ranks your connections does a visibly better job with this file than without it.

A note on privacy

This file is other people's data. The Email column especially. If you upload it anywhere, know what happens to it. wait who? reads the file in your browser, keeps only name, URL, company, position and connection date, drops the email column before anything is stored, and stores nothing at all until you create an account. That is the standard I would hold any tool to, including ours.

Turn the export into a list you can act on.

wait who? reads your Connections.csv in your browser (nothing is uploaded), matches it to your live LinkedIn network, and shows you the twenty people worth a message this week, with the reason for each.

Try it →