Wanting access to my network is different than wanting to be in my network

Ah, LinkedIn. I love it. It's a great tool for finding who is out there. We've made a number of hires off their job postings as well. But I still get connection requests from people I don't know. Sigh.

This week, I decided to take a different approach with the recruiters that contacted me via LinkedIn (two of whom were referred to me by another recruiting blogger they work with). Instead of telling them that I only connect with people I already know, I offered to get to know them and suggested a day that would be good for us to speak. I responded that I would be willing to connect officially after we chat. That's pretty fair, right? I don't have time to do this all the time (especially with people outside the industry), but I've spoken with a couple people that do this as a general practice (granted they both do consulting work so it makes sense for them to be spending time this way) and it works for them.

So what happened? One recruiter did not respond at all. The other said she'd call me yesterday and didn't. I'm not sure what to think about my little experiment. I don't want to assume that people only want to connect with me via LinkedIn to have access to my network, but what else am I to think?

I will continue to laugh at the LinkedIn requests that state "since you are a person I trust..." and I will still yell back at my computer monitor "Why do you trust me? You don't even know me!".