Leveraging LinkedIn: Recommendations and Reciprocity

“A Recommendation is like qualitative data bringing specific, powerful and most key, the perspective of personal experience to your LinkedIn Profile”.

 

Most of us grew up hearing if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.  In practice we often don’t say anything at all even when we have nice things to say. So how do you go beyond just saying thank you when a colleague or professional contact demonstrates value to you time and again?  One way to do this is by writing a two sentence recommendation for them on LinkedIn.

We often casually think of a LinkedIn profile as an on-line version of your resume, but in addition to your work history, it can be an incredibly powerful resource for you to develop and display your professional reputation to colleagues and future employers. If you think of yourself as a business, it becomes a location where potential employers can casually browse and learn more as they are making a recruiting decision.  Like any business, testimonials and word of mouth recommendations are among the most powerfully effective advertising.

How does my recommendation help others?

• A testimonial that enhances their profile with a brief personal example what people have worked with them have to say about the experience.
• Positive feedback on their contributions to a specific project or time period in a position
• An opportunity for potential employers to have a more 3-dimensional view of them as a candidate (in the words of others)

How does my recommendation help me?

• More exposure to your profile and provides a small window into your experience that may pique the interest of recruiters and potential employers.
• Demonstrates you are a contributor in that you are taking extra time to provide additional depth to the potential candidacy of a former or current colleague.
• Writing a LinkedIn recommendation can be a good way to leverage the principle of reciprocity to receive a recommendation. It is human nature to return a kind act with an act in kind.

Why not just endorse skills on LinkedIn?

As early adopters of LinkedIn may remember, recommendations played a much larger role on your profile as they do now.  Skill Endorsements are now clearly what people think when they think of want to give someone a professional “thumbs up” on LinkedIn.  Skill Endorsements are generally accurate, somewhat helpful (depending on the specificity of the skill and number of those endorsing it) and most of all, easy to do – in a few clicks you can enforce a dozen of your 1^st degree connections.  Here are a couple of rough analogies to highlight the differences:

Research analogy:

• Skill Endorsements compile and quantify individual data points (endorsers) providing a visually interesting representation on your profile.
• A Recommendation is like qualitative data bringing specific, powerful and most key, the perspective of personal experience to your LinkedIn Profile.

Facebook analogy (after a great experience at a restaurant):

• A Skill Endorsement is to Like the restaurant on Facebook
• A Recommendation is posting about your positive experience at the restaurant to your friends on Facebook

I am not advocating you abandon skill endorsements, only emphasizing that they provide some information that could be rounded out, in part with a brief.

How do I write a recommendation on LinkedIn?

It’s true, recommendations on LinkedIn involve more time than skill endorsements, but not as much time as you might think. Once you are on a colleague’s profile, simply scroll down to the recommendations section, click on the link, fill out a couple of drop down fields and write two or three sentences encapsulating:

• Their professional competence
• Attributes of their character
• The context in which you worked with them

Example #1: Project Team Member:

“John Doe and I worked together on several projects together between 2014 and 2016.  In my experience, he is a fair minded and component leader that is always seeking to improve his organization and reach out making connections with others that will benefit his clients”.

Example #2: Undergraduate Intern:

“John Doe is a clear thinking and trustworthy leader, who earns the loyalty of those with whom he works, through a solid work ethic and leading by example. He is an outstanding example of a new professional in our field who translated his experiences as an undergraduate into his professional life”.

From the two examples you can gain a sense of just how simple it is to write a quick recommendation on LinkedIn. With fewer people writing recommendations on LinkedIn instead electing for the endorse skills function recommendations have become more effective ways of standing out as a candidate.

So do you think these brief recommendations are more effective than skill endorsements?  Have you recommended others in the past and does reciprocity work?  Let me know in the comments below.

Visit thyrone.com where you can read past posts and we can connect on LinkedIn and other media.    Follow me on Twitter @thyrone and if you are in the Columbus, OH area @careercolumbus.