Soliciting people at a company you want to work on LinkedIn for information: great way to network and get hired, or great way to ensure you never work there?

I've been out of school for almost 10 years, but my alma mater has a career development department for all alumni to use regardless of when they graduated. I've been looking for new jobs and decided to utilize them, because I figured it couldn't hurt.

They assigned me an "alumni advisor" to help me with this process, and beyond proofreading my resume, she wasn't much help. Namely, she stated that if I had a specific company in my area I wanted to work for, that I randomly connect with people working there on LinkedIn and solicit them for information about getting a job there.

Now, my gut reaction was that this was a great way to piss off people and essentially never get a job at the company in question, because in my experience people hate being solicited for things like that. She's unfortunately been insistent that I do it, going as far as to tell me I have a negative attitude for even being reluctant to do it.

So, does this actually work, or is this advisor full of it?

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