7 Steps to Make Your LinkedIn Endorsements Believable

LinkedIn upgraded its Skills section late last year to allow your first level connections to provide affirmation that you do indeed possess certain skills. Consider that to be good news because recruiters and hiring managers are more comfortable trusting your skills claims when they have credible corroborating evidence.

Unfortunately, people have gone a little overboard in endorsing each other on LinkedIn, thus causing great skepticism about the validity of these endorsements. If you have a large network that includes people you don’t know at all, then you’re at particular risk for this problem.

Here’s what you can do to ensure that your endorsements enhance, rather than cheapen, your profile:

1. Click “Profile/Edit Profile” on LinkedIn’s main drop down menu.
2. Scroll down to “Skills and Expertise” and click on the little blue pencil on the right-hand side of the page.
3. Select “Add and Remove.” LinkedIn lets you display ten items in an attractive vertical display.  Beyond ten, it goes to a cluttered horizontal display. Shudder. Limit yourself to no more than ten skills. Pick the ones you want to be hired to do. Delete the rest. Resist the urge to go beyond ten. It puts you at risk of looking like a Jack of All Trades and Master of None.
4. Now click “Manage Endorsements.” Review who has endorsed you for each skill and uncheck people who don’t know enough about you to know whether or not you have that skill. Do it. You can always recheck them if it hurts too much a day or two from now. It won’t.
5. Click “Save” to keep your changes.
6. Scroll back up to the top of your profile and click “Done Editing” to make your changes public.
7. As you receive additional endorsements, only accept them if they match your list in Item 3 above and if they’re from credible endorsers.

As you can see, you control the quality of your Skills section. When you do steps 1 through 7 above, you increase the credibility of your endorsements. You also say something about your integrity — that you don’t use endorsements from people not qualified to give them. People can click on the little arrow to the right of your endorsers’ thumbnail photos and see exactly who has endorsed you. When your endorsers look like believable members of your network, then you look believable as well.

BTW, please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/donnasvei. My email address is donnasvei@gmail.com. I love connecting with people who read my blog!

I write executive resumes and LinkedIn profiles. Save time. Get hired. Email me at donnasvei@gmail.com or call me at (208) 721-0131.

 

Tagged as: LinkedIn