Asking for Recommendations | JobSearchTV.com
By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
LinkedIn has made it very easy to ask for recommendations. Here, I explained how to make the request.
LinkedIn Profile Differentiation
I want to talk with you today about 2 areas on your LinkedIn profile that most people really need to beef up. Everyone talks with you about the headline. That’s the line underneath your name. They may talk with you about the summary area as a way of telling your story.
The things that people Keep skipping are 2 areas– the 1st 1 which I think is the more important one is the recommendations area. LinkedIn has made it much easier to ask for recommendations. If you scroll down to the area on your profile where you have recommendations listed, there is now something that says,
“Ask to be Recommended.”
You can reach out to someone that you work with, someone that you have worked with, a client, or any number of individuals whom you can now ask. It 1st asks you, “Whom Do You Want to Ask.” From there, you feel that in. You then select what the relationship is or was… Whether you manage them, or they reported to them, whether they were senior to you, whether you worked with them in the same group at different companies, a client, taught or mentored, advised, you were students together… Whatever it is, there is now a way you can preselect what the relationship was between the 2 of you and your position and firm at the time of the association with one another. Then, you can send a request for a recommendation to someone through LinkedIn and get more recommendations.
I don’t know how it is for you, but if you are trying to hire someone or trying to recruit someone and you see someone with (I’m going to come back to this in a second) 50 recommendations or 5 or 500, which one you give more credence to? You notice whether their 500 recommendations or 50, rather than 5.
Another area to pay attention to is the one called, “Featured Skills and Endorsements.” This is always been an easy way to ask people to support you. It’s basically a checkbox. I know in my case from all the years I spent in executive search, I have hundreds of recommendations for executive search, for recruiting, for technical recruiting, and, by comparison, my Coaching checkbox is a lot less. It has more than 100, but it is not prioritized highly because most of my career was in recruiting and people featured and endorsed me for that.
However you do it, I want to encourage you to also ask people to endorse you for particular skills so that, in this way, again, you are standing out from others whom employers or search firms are trying to reach out to because, again, you’re always looking for ways to differentiate yourself and numbers are really it.
So the recommendations give texture there because people are actually writing about you. For endorsements and featured skills, you are offered what is basically a checkbox to tell them what to endorse you for so they don’t pick done things as some people did for me in the early days. I have recommendations for SDLC or karma. That endorsement is nonsense. It has nothing to do with anything.
I’ll simply say, tell them what to do and I’m sure a lot of folks will do it to support you with your search.
[svp]https://youtu.be/71wdcDkVYtA[/svp]
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ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a coach who worked as a recruiter for what seems like one hundred years. His work involves career coaching, as well as executive job search coaching, job coaching, and interview coaching. He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 2400 episodes.
Are you interested in 1:1 coaching, interview coaching, advice about networking more effectively, how to negotiate your offer or leadership coaching? People hire me to provide No BS career advice whether that is about a job search, hiring better, leadership, management or support with a workplace issue. Schedule a discovery call at my website, www.TheBigGameHunter.us
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