A few years ago LinkedIn introduced the Endorsements feature allowing your first degree connections to give you a thumbs-up for one of your listed Skills. It has morphed into a skills popularity contest….and a total waste of time.
” Endorse Joe for Social Networking?“ prompts my LinkedIn homepage. Sure! He’s on Linkedin isn’t he – he must know something about it. “Endorse Amy for Customer Service? ” Absolutely – I’m sure she’s good with customers ….if I could remember who Amy was that is. And on it goes. LinkedIn connections collecting meaningless little picture boxes beside their listed Skills.
Listing Skills is important – collecting Endorsements is not
Skills should be included on your profile – they help direct employers and business opportunities to your profile Collecting the endorsements to accompany the skills isn’t worth your time or effort and doesn’t impress anyone who knows how LinkedIn works.
Here’s why I’m switching off the Endorsements on my profile. I was approached recently by a Skills Endorsement company who, in exchange for me introducing them to my clients, offered to give me a nice free kickback by getting me:
” 99+ endorsements on any 5 of your skills FOR FREE”
According to their email they run a very successful business selling a Skills endorsement service. They target individuals and companies like mine who help clients write their LinkedIn profiles. They assured me that they are working with at least 6 companies who provide LinkedIn profile writing services to clients.
So if you don’t think you have enough endorsements you can contact them and, for a fee, they will find completely random people, who know absolutely nothing about you, to confirm that you are great at whatever you suggest. Rent-a-crowd for your skills. Credibility of all skills endorsements as a result = ZERO.
I declined their offer of 99+ endorsements and disabled the Skills endorsement button of my profile. From now on I’ll rely on real feedback from people who know me and my work – how novel is that?
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