Some of you may have read the post I wrote a few weeks ago about LinkedIn Endorsements. In this post, I said I thought endorsements were a good addition to LinkedIn – they are a nice way of easily giving a ‘thumbs up’ to a contact’s skills.
Since that original post, I have been endorsed by over 100 different people, with the skill ‘Social Media’ being endorsed by 58 people. Now I consider myself to be very lucky to receive such endorsements and I thank everybody who was kind enough to endorse me.
However, I think it is almost too easy to endorse somebody. When that box of 4 people appears at the top of a profile, with encouragement to make an endorsement, it is too easy to click ‘Endorse’ without really thinking about what you are doing and whether the person actually has the skill you are endorsing. I find it very annoying that you can’t tell LinkedIn that you don’t want to endorse Joe Bloggs for ‘Small Business’. If you click the cross to get rid of the suggestion, it reappears the next time the boxes appear. In order to remove it you have to click endorse.
This devalues the whole process, in my opinion, as endorsements are being made that aren’t real. I wonder how many endorsements I would get if I added ‘Sewing’ to my profile?
I hope LinkedIn improve the area of endorsements as part of the major changes that are happening to profiles over the next few months. What do you think of endorsements?
