A former coworker of mine emailed me and asked if I could recommend her on LinkedIn based on our prior work together. Happy to do so, but all I can see is how to “endorse” someone on LI.
Used to be that LinkedIn was all about recommendations, short 2-3 sentence endorsements people you’d worked for or with would leave on your LinkedIn profile that would help potential clients and employers learn what a great team player or member you are. A few years ago, however, they added a completely separate keyword-based “endorsements” feature where people who generally barely know you can click on a few keywords and help you rank higher for those particular words in searches.
The concept’s good, but the value is still quite a bit less than actual recommendations because they’re fast, easy and superficial. A recommendation, even just a paragraph or a few sentences, still is a more visible testimonial and therefore more valuable. Problem is, LinkedIn has made it hard to figure out how to leave recommendations because of their enthusiasm about these endorsements.
Fortunately a colleague recently asked me to write her a recommendation, so I had the chance to go through the various hoops…
To start, go to the LinkedIn Profile page for the person you want to recommend. To the right of their profile photo you’ll see this:
That endorse button? That’s not what you want. In fact, click on it and you’ll be pushed down to something like this:
Nice if Audrey has these skills or expertise, but this isn’t what you seek.
To find the recommendation area, you need to scroll down. Quite a bit further down for most profiles. Until you find this:
There we go! Click on “Recommend [name]” and a big form opens up:
As you can see, you have the chance to write a recommendation – and I suggest that you make it detailed and specific – and a cover note to the person in question. You also need to specify the relationship you have with the person, and here are all the many options:
Quite a set of choices!
Specify everything, enter a recommendation, click “Send” and you’ll get a quick confirmation it worked:
That’s all there is to the process. The other party can now read your recommendation and either accept or reject it.
Done.