Potential employers, clients, and referral partners pay attention to the kinds of skills you are endorsed for. They also review the recommendations you have received. Yet many people remain reluctant to ask for public recognition for the work they do.

Testimonials Computer Key Showing Recommendations And Tributes O

Skill-based endorsements and recommendations are vital ways to make your profile stand out and encourage people to contact you rather than someone else in your business.

Endorsements for Skills

There are a few things to do, however, before you start requesting endorsements from your contacts:

  1. Begin by reviewing the skills currently listed in your profile to be sure that they are reflective of your current abilities
    1. Remove any that are no longer applicable or just aren’t what you want to emphasize right now.
    2. Revise the order in which your skills are displayed to place the most important or most impressive at the top. Simply click on the “add skills” button in the top right corner of the skills section and drag each skill to the spot in the listing where you want it to appear.
  2. Now you’re in a better position to determine which of your listed skills could use a few more endorsements.
  3. Message key connections via LinkedIn (or through email) and ask them to endorse three or four specific skills with which they are familiar. Explain in your request that all they need to do is go to your profile, scroll down to skills, and click on the + sign to the right of a specific skill.

 

Recommendations

Although it is helpful to have endorsements for your skills, it is even more valuable to have recommendations for specific accomplishments, and it doesn’t matter whether the work you did was in a paid or volunteer role.

Again, it’s best to be deliberate and thoughtful about the process. Here are some things to consider prior to asking for recommendations.

  • Determine what you wish to be recommended for. It might be an entire position or it might be your specific contribution to an important project.
  • Reflect on which of your LinkedIn connections are in the best position to write a short “testimonial” for the quality of that work.
  • Ask these people for a recommendation by going to your recommendation section and clicking on “Ask to be Recommended.”
  • When the next screen appears, click on “Ask for Recommendations” and type in the name of the person whom you would like to recommend you. Another box will appear then, asking what you want to be recommended for. Select the position for which you want to be recommended from the list which will be populated with the positions you have listed in your profile.
  • You can enter up to three names of people to ask at the same time, but I suggest doing this one person at a time and personalizing your request, especially if you want specific aspects of a position highlighted in the recommendation. If you don’t tell the recommender what you want, you may receive a broad general recommendation that doesn’t highlight your best skills. Or you may not get anything at all because the person you’ve asked doesn’t know what to say.
  • Next move on to the drop down for relationship, and select your relationship to the person you are asking for the recommendation as well as their position at the time when they saw you in action.
  • Now write a short message that is very specific about what you’d like them to recommend you for – this both jogs their memory and insures that you receive recommendations for the areas you most want to highlight.
  • Click send and wait for the accolades to come rolling in.

 

How About You?

Are you asking your LinkedIn connections to recommend and/or endorse you? What kinds of response have you received? How has having recommendations and endorsements made a positive difference for you? How do you feel when someone asks you to recommend them and they have done these steps as compared to when you receive a generic request? Does it make a difference in the recommendation you write?

 

About Joyce

Joyce Feustel, Founder of Boomers' Social Media Tutor

Joyce Feustel helps people, especially those age 50 and up, to become more effective using social media, especially Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter. She works with business owners, nonprofit organizations, consultants, and many others. Find her at www.boomerssocialmediatutor.com.