Should I Ask for LinkedIn Endorsements or Recommendations?
By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
Someone I coach asked me whether or not it was better to get endorsements or recommendations on LinkedIn. I answer this directly.
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Someone asked me a question about whether or not it’s better to go for endorsements or recommendations on LinkedIn. So, let me first describe or define what each one of them is.
In the LinkedIn vernacular, endorsements are a tick box. People endorse you for certain skills. It requires next to no effort on their part. They click on something. Sometimes, they select something for you and check the box as though this is an expertise for you.
Recommendations are a long form statement from someone who knows you. Often you’ll ask them for the recommendation, because you know, they have a way of benchmarking your experience and actually evaluating you.
So let me use myself as an example. You know, I have as of the time I’m recording, I have 23,000 1st level connections. And I have stopped and have started to eliminate people from outside the US. I’ve done that because LinkedIn has a hard cap on 30,000. People, I don’t want to be scrambling at that time to eliminate folks. I’m doing that now.
So, there are people who have written or have given me endorsements, from my time in recruiting for “systems development lifecycle,” for example. “Internet recruiting . . . which I never did. Sourcing people. You know, nonsense kinds of things that really have no value to me or to someone evaluating me. After all, what would a recruiter know about systems development lifecycle anyway?
It got to a point where it’s several hundred of these before I noticed it.Thus, I eliminated it because it was useless and it was misleading. And you’ll probably wind up with things like that, too.
I’ll just simply say, recommendations, in contrast, are actually written statements from people that describe the relationship that you had, and what you did and how you earned that trust from someone. It has texture to it. It’s telling a story of someone’s experience of you that has value.
The check box next to something doesn’t mean anything. After all, what does that guy in Mumbai know about you and your experience, that you happen to be connected with them through a group, for example, and what are they really know? They’re looking for reciprocity because, Lord knows, I used to get a lot of those messages from people who would say, “Hey, I’ll endorse you for these five things. You endorse me, too.”
No. I don’t want to game the LinkedIn system. I want it to have actual value.
So I’ll just simply say recommendations have more value to you and to other people. Endorsements not so much.
ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
People hire Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter to provide No BS Career Advice globally because he makes many things in peoples’ careers easier. Those
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