How to Manage Skills and Endorsements on Linkedin

Linkedin Advises: When you log in to your LinkedIn account, it sometimes comes up with a suggestion whether you are willing to endorse some of your connections for certain skills or not. In this case, you do not have to think much about which skills you need to endorse people for. A pop-up shows at the very top of your profile asking if you want to endorse your connection for said skills. You can either choose to skip them or end up endorsing your network connections in LinkedIn.

A Shorter Way: If you do not want to write long recommendations for someone, you can simply endorse them for their skills. And if you want to get recommended, you can ask some of your endorsers to recommend you as well. LinkedIn is a platform of mutually beneficial relationship. Hence it is important to take care of your connections and nurture them from time to time rather than just creating them and forget later.

Who can endorse you ? As a LinkedIn user, you can endorse those people who are there on your network and those who are your first connections. But here one thing should be remembered, endorsement from people, who don’t know you well are not that strong. Just filling up and piling your profile with a list of endorsements is not a very good idea. Quality matters here over quantity.

Display or Hide it: Suppose if you are getting endorsements from people you don’t know. Few such instances can be there, which is quite okay. But if there are more than required, you should think about it and manage it wisely. Once someone endorses you, it is not possible to delete them. However, you can hide them. If you want to hide an endorsement, go to your “Me” section in LinkedIn, click “View Profile”, come to “Featured Skills & Endorsements”, click on any skill and uncheck that box, the endorsement, and the endorser will be hidden from your profile.

Change the Order: You can also change the order of your skill endorsements by editing your profile. All you need to do is, click on the Me button, go to View Profile section, go to Featured Skills & Endorsements, click the pencil looking edit button. Click and drag your skills to re-arrange them. After re-ordering your skills you want to show first, save the entire action.

From People You Know: while endorsing someone or getting endorsed by individuals, it is always good to endorse them whom you know or with whom you have worked. It gives some weightage to your profile. And if you are more concerned about quality and a number of endorsements, then there could be many. You can remove those endorsements which came from a blank profile or profiles that do not have a profile picture. In this case, your skill section will show mostly gray icons without any image that will not look good or impressive.

Keywords Based: Actually it is all about keywords game. These endorsements are also nothing but keywords. LinkedIn allows you to add up to 50 skills. Though, it is not necessary to add all of them. Remove the skills that are not so relevant in today’s context. Remove those skills that you are not focusing currently. These keywords or skills are utilized by Linkedin internal search engine.

How to Get Them: As discussed earlier, LinkedIn is a platform of mutual beneficial professional podium, hence to get endorsements or recommendation, you first need to take the initiative to extend your help to the connections in your network. It will compel them to take few seconds and return the favour to you in the form of recommendations or simple, quick endorsement.

Keep Your Skills Relevant: If you want to be endorsed by people for your correct and recent skills, you need to keep this section in your LinkedIn profile updated. If you have written content for one of the websites years back during your initial career, and now you are looking for event management profile, it is wise not to get hundreds of recommendation for content writing skills. Hence it is important to keep your skills section updated so as to get right recommendations or right endorsement for right skill.

Can Lead to Good Recommendation: Generally people will shy away from giving out Recommendations at one go. So, if you have a good number of endorsements for a particular skill of yours, you can also ask for recommendation from people who have endorsed you for that skill. For example, if you are working on a project which takes a lot of effort in coordinating with clients, stakeholders and making public relations, you can ask your Manager of peer to recommend you based on this demonstrated skills.

What Recruiters Think: Some of the recruiters said that they hardly pay attention to how many endorsements you have on your LinkedIn profile as there are few of them which came from people you even don’t know. It does not validate whether the endorser actually knows about the skills, how much he/she knows about the skills and whether he/she thought before endorsing someone as it just pops up when you log in.

Still, we cannot completely ignore the importance of endorsements as it enhances our social media presence. If you are applying for a job and you have 40-50 endorsements for that one skill which is highly sought after by the recruiter, it will at least attract the eye of a recruiter, customer or a hiring consultant. It would not take much of your time to manage your profile and manage your endorsements. Keep it updated and keep it relevant. Rest everything will fall into place as it should be.

Happy Networking!