Many of us have noticed the introduction of endorsements in the past week by LinkedIn. Endorsements relate to the skills and expertise that you have listed on your profile – now with one click, a connection can endorse a specific skill that you have listed.
All users are being prompted to either add skills to their profile or endorse the skills that a connection (of theirs) has listed. The implications of this are pretty clear when you look at the revised public profile layout that was introduced around two weeks ago.
Key Points re LinkedIn Skills Endorsement
Here are some key points to keep in mind:
- Don’t endorse-spam people – Each endorsement you give creates an activity point so spread out the endorsement love
- Don’t miss-use – just as recommendations struggled due to miss-use – the same might happen with endorsements. We also need to think about the impact an endorsement might have on our reputation
- Skills are even more important – make sure you have the right skills listed on your profile
- Skills and Expertise is a section that firstly needs to be on your profile, and secondly can be moved around – so think about having this section reasonably high up your profile page
- Be realistic – I’m not sure how many skills should be listed – personally I’d err on the side of fewer rather than lots
Finally, be careful with the options that LinkedIn presents. The system will prompt you to endorse a connection or a group of connections – the screen shot below actually auto endorses the connection for what ever is listed.
My recommendation would be to skip this feature and endorse further down their profile.
