Who in Your LinkedIn Network Changed Jobs This Month?
Here is a number that surprised me when I first checked it on my own account: my network is 7,998 people, and roughly 20% of any professional network changes jobs in a given year. That is about 130 people a month, moving somewhere new, quietly, while I am doing something else.
Every one of those moves is a moment. A former customer just became a buyer somewhere else. A champion who loved your product now has a new budget. The recruiter you liked is at a company that is hiring. And LinkedIn, which knows all of this, shows you maybe two of them in your feed, if the algorithm feels like it.
So the question "who in my LinkedIn network changed jobs" is a good one. The honest answer is that LinkedIn itself gives you three bad tools and no good one. Here is what actually works, from free and manual to automatic.
Why LinkedIn won't just tell you
It used to. Years ago the "Network Updates" feed had a filter for changes to your connections' status, and it was genuinely useful. That filter is gone. Today job changes are folded into the main feed, ranked against everything else, and most of them never surface. The notification you sometimes get ("Congratulate X on the new role") is a sample, not a list.
Sales Navigator does better: its lead lists flag "changed jobs in the past 90 days." But it only watches leads you saved, it caps at 1,500 of them, and it costs about €99 a month for the privilege. For most founders and operators that is the wrong shape of tool for the question.
Way 1: the free export diff (30 minutes, twice a year)
LinkedIn lets you download your connections as a CSV. Settings, Data privacy, Get a copy of your data, tick only "Connections," request it. In my case the file was ready in three minutes, though no email came; I had to refresh the page. The file has seven columns, and two of them are exactly what you need: Company and Position.
Do that today, keep the file. Do it again in three months. Put both in a spreadsheet, match rows on the URL column, and look at everyone whose Company changed. That list is your job-change report, and it costs nothing.
The catch is the interval. A diff every quarter means you hear about a move up to three months late, which is long after the "congrats on the new role" window closed. It is a great baseline and a poor alert.
Way 2: watch the 100 people who matter (weekly, by hand)
You do not care equally about all 8,000 people. You care about the 50 to 100 who could buy, hire, invest, or introduce. Put them in a list and glance at their profiles once a week. LinkedIn shows "Current: Company" at the top of a profile, so a scan takes seconds per person.
This is what most salespeople actually do, and it works right up until the week you skip it. It also scales badly: at 100 profiles a week you are spending an hour on lookups, and LinkedIn quietly rate-limits heavy profile viewing anyway.
Way 3: let something watch for you (weekly, automatic)
The version that scales is boring: keep the current job for everyone in your network, refresh it on a schedule, and diff. When someone's company or title changes, put them on a short list with the reason, and let you decide what to do.
That is what wait who? does. It reads your network once, keeps company, title and the date you connected for each person, refreshes weekly, and every Monday shows you the people whose situation changed, with a one-line why: "Joanne started as Founder at a new company in June; you connected the same week." From there it is one click to a draft message you edit before anything sends.
The first run is free to try for seven days, and the list is small on purpose. Twenty people with a real reason beats two thousand "high value" badges nobody can act on.
What to say when you find one
The move itself is the reason to write, so do not invent another one. Short, specific, no ask:
Two things make this work. It is sent within a week or two of the change, while it is still news to them. And it does not sell. If there is a fit, it comes up on its own; people who just changed jobs are unusually open to conversations, because everything at the new place is still being decided.
Which way is right for you
If you check your network a couple of times a year, the export diff is enough and it is free. If you have a list of people whose moves genuinely matter to your business, and you would rather not spend your Mondays refreshing profiles, let software do the watching. Either way, start with the export today, because the first diff needs a first file.