Working With The Flaw in LinkedIn’s Endorsement System

If you’re a LinkedIn user, you’ve likely noticed that they are promoting use of their new Endorsement System by asking you to endorse the skills of your contacts. I urge you to read this before clicking any further.

First let’s briefly explore the difference between endorsements and recommendations.

LinkedIn Recommendations

These are the narrative essay-type referral letters that we write to endorse the talents and expertise of our connections. When you write a recommendation, your contact has the opportunity to review and approve it prior to it going public. You can both solicit and control the content of the recommendations that appear on your LInkedIn profile.

LinkedIn Endorsements

Endorsements are more user friendly, at first glance. There is no writing required. No approval required. LinkedIn is systematically soliciting their members to endorse the skills of your contacts. Their system is selecting skills from your list of skills and suggesting to your connections that they endorse them. This creates a rated and ranked list of skills that is displayed on your profile.

The Flaw in LinkedIn’s Endorsement System

There’s a flaw in their suggestion system. When soliciting endorsements from you and your contacts, LinkedIn’s system selects one skill from your list of skills and suggests that your contacts endorse that skill. Most of us simply click on the skill. The result is that your profile skills listing will be heavily weighted toward the skill that their system selected to solicit. The problem is that the skills that your connections blindly endorse (the solicitation does not allow choices) may not be the skills that best define your talent or even skills that your connection has experienced in working with you.

So in LinkedIn’s zest to get their members to engage in using their new endorsement feature, their system is creating inaccurate ratings of your skills and you have little control over how this is portrayed in YOUR profile.

The Workaround

If you actually view a contact’s profile and scroll down to the skills section, you then have the opportunity to select the skills you want to endorse by clicking on the specific skills.

Our Recommendations

• Avoid using the endorsement dialog boxes that appear at the top of LinkedIn pages. Instead go to your contact’s page and scroll down to select the actual skills you want to endorse from the contact’s profile page.
• Consider sharing this page using the LinkedIn Button below.
• Or adding a link to this post (short link= http://wp.me/p2N47J-5s ) to your LinkedIn and or Twitter status update. Include a message urging your contacts endorse responsibly.

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