LinkedIn: Recommendations and Endorsements

While these two terms sound very similar, they are very different in LinkedIn.

A recommendation in LinkedIn is a lot like a letter of recommendation you might ask for from a past employer. In LinkedIn, however, it is acceptable to have a recommendation from anyone who can speak to your professional experience. In addition to former supervisors you might ask for recommendations from former co-workers who can describe what is what like to have you as a team member, or even “outsiders” like vendors and clients who worked with you as a representative of your former employer.

• You can ask other people who are already on LinkedIn to give you a recommendation, or they can do it on their own.
• You will get to review all recommendations before they show up on your page.
• If you get a recommendation from someone be sure it supports the story you want told about you. A former co-worker might say great things about working with you in general, but maybe it would be more helpful if they could also say something specific about your technical skills? If so, don’t be afraid to explain that to them and ask them to modify it.
• You can change the visibility of recommendations without deleting them, so if you are seeking a job where a certain recommendation might detract from the brand you are trying to project, you can hide it temporarily.
• You should have at least one recommendation for every job you have listed, especially for your positions in the last five years. Ideally, you have more than one for each position but don’t go overboard. It is highly unlikely recruiters will read more than the first few, so having 20 for each job probably won’t help much more than having three.

  One of the best ways to get a recommendation is to give one yourself to someone you know. If you do, make it a good one! Here are six easy steps to writing a good professional recommendation:

• Open with a hook. Start with a statement about the person that might make someone want to read more, e.g., “Susan was my favorite colleague because, no mater what challenge she was facing, she always had a smile on her face.”
• Describe the relationship: “I worked with Susan for three months on the web content team at Time Magazine. She and I collaborated on several successful projects that were recognized by upper management.”
• Share a standout trait: “She has the ability to write really inspiring content even under strict deadlines…”
• Discuss a time they did that well in the past: “…such as the blog series she did on app development that required her to do research, interview guests and write three blog posts all within a two day timeframe.”
• Include something personal/funny about the person: Be careful with this. Humor can be a very subjective thing. Play it safe and stick to non-controversial things. “She’s also great at minigolf!”
• Recommend the person be hired: “She would be a great addition to any team.”

Now, string it all together:

“Susan was my favorite colleague at XYZ Company because, no matter what challenge she was facing, she would always have a smile on her face. I worked with Susan for three months on the web content team at Time Magazine and she and I collaborated on several successful projects that were recognized by upper management. She always impressed me with her ability to write really inspiring content even under strict deadlines, such as the blog series she wrote on app development that required her to do research, interview experts and write three blog posts all within a two day time frame. She’s also really good at mini-golf! It was my pleasure to work with Susan and I would do so again in a heartbeat. She would be a great addition to any team!”

Endorsements are different. When you create your profile, you will add in a section for the skills that you have to offer. As your connections use their LinkedIn profiles they will occasionally be prompted to “endorse” you for some of your listed skills. When they do your “count” for those skills goes up and their photo will show up next to that skills. Over time, this becomes a kind of “crowd sourced” validation of the skills you claim to have. Once you start using the system you will see that sometimes you will be asked to endorse others for a skill you have no idea of they actually have (and you will see others do this for you). The system actually has an algorithm built in to account for some of the randomness of this feature. It looks for the strength of your connection to the person you are endorsing and provides greater weight to some endorsements than others (in the background). For your top three skills only, LinkedIn will also highlight the endorsements that come from people you have worked with (who likely know you better than others) and from others who are also highly rated at that skill (talent knows what talent looks like), which can carry extra weight with recruiters. So, while every endorsement increases your endorsement count by one, not every endorsement is equal.

Without intervention, your skills will organize in the order of the most endorsed skill first. However, in some cases this may not be what you want to represent to the world. LinkedIn allows you to re-order your skills, or hide them, as well. If you choose to hide a skill it will still retain any previous endorsements in case you want to make it visible later, but it will no longer be active to receive new endorsements.