LinkedIn’s new(ish) endorsement feature has been around long enough for me to have a stab at working out what they mean, what value they add and whether they’re a useful or useless feature.
It’s worth starting this by saying I’m a fan of LinkedIn. It’s a credible, useful social network for professional purposes. I’ve reached out to people I want to work with through it, and had others do vice versa with me. It’s unambiguously about business, and this tends to keep interaction more focused and, dare I say it, brief. On LinkedIn there ain’t no Lolcats.
I’ve got 10 full recommendations on my page. These are from people I’ve worked closely with and have been accumulated over the last five or so years. Most of these I approached because we worked well together. The writers have all given their recommendations a great deal of thought. Because of this, I think they’re valuable. Since LinkedIn Endorsements were launched last September, I’ve been endorsed a whopping 65 times. How valuable are these?
LinkedIn claim that endorsements are like a “recommendation lite” which allow people to vouch for your skills quickly, instead of writing a full recommendation. Whilst it might be apposite to ask “what value does a recommendation have if someone doesn’t want to put the time into writing one”, I think LinkedIn Endorsements raises a more interesting question.
Do people think you are who you think you are?
The way the endorsements work is their headings are (mostly) drawn from the skills you claim to have command of in your own profile. The problem is, LinkedIn Recommendations, simply can’t confirm, with any degree of usefulness, any skill you have in various areas. They can’t because the process is too open, random and brief for that. Anyone of my 700+ contacts can endorse me, no matter how briefly they might have worked with me, or even whether they’ve worked with me at all. Instead, LinkedIn Endorsements make the following simple point:
“when I think of you, I think of [x]“
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My current LinkedIn Endorsements (click to enlarge)
So looking at my endorsements, you can see that people think of me as the music guy. When asked, people see this as far and away the most resonant part of my work identity. The number who do so equal to the next two categories combined: Creative Direction and Strategic Planning. And the other skills I claim to have? They might as well not figure.
So what does this mean?
In a way it says as much about the company I keep as it does about me. With around 20 years work behind me, many of my contacts are from music (see the following chart for the top 10 industry categories in my LinkedIn profile making up around 85% of my total contacts). So it’s not surprising that when they endorse me, they endorse my knowledge of their industry. Moreover, people in other industries have been introduced to me via music – so they’re more likely to know me for my music knowledge too.
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My LinkedIn contacts by industry (click to enlarge)
Obvious factoid #1: The more people you know in one industry, the more likely you’ll collect LinkedIn endorsements for knowledge of that industry.
For me, it’s left me with two distinct feelings. The first is that I need to relax and get used to being the music guy. Yes, what I do mainly now is strategic planning, but one of my USPs is that I was an artist, with a deep understanding of how artists think and work. I’m a planner who naturally thinks like a creative.
The other thing is a bit more radical. If I want to present myself in a new way, and have LinkedIn recommendations reflect that change (and the same for you if you want to do the same) we might have to either not put the most prominent, obvious knowledge area in our list of skills at all (so people can’t pick it, or are less likely to be offered it by LinkedIn’s bots) OR weed out our contacts list – omitting people who are historic work colleagues from an industry we no longer work in. After all, don’t those contacts belong in Facebook instead?
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