thermostatI have always loved to hate LinkedIn’s Endorsements.

Over-used (10 billion endorsements given in just over 4 years!) and usually a strange game unfolds on your profile home page:

  • LinkedIn mechanically suggests that someone endorses you for a skill you may (or may not!) list on your profile and even tho they have no experience with you in that skill, they feel the urge to click away.
  • Or, you get electronically bombarded with suggestions from LinkedIn to endorse others. Some of whom you do not know!

Yes, very odd.

Why, you may ask, would I not want someone I already know to endorse me? It’s mostly because some people think that when they endorse me for ALL my listed skills, whether they actually have experienced my expertise in that area, they think they are being nice. That they are helping me. I don’t doubt their intentions. But endorsing me for a skill they don’t really know I have? Is that helping me? Not really.

So thanks to LinkedIn, (some) help is on the way. Soon you will see your endorsements in a different way, and that will bring the good ones to the front of the pack. So will readers of your profile.

Subtle yet important. LinkedIn is changing from the old format of showing your skill then an array of tiny headshots of people who endorsed you for that skill to a better (IMHO) model of showing the skill and below it a list of names of mutual connections you and the reader of your profile both are connected to. It’s already on your smartphone app, as you can see below, and soon to appear on the new user desktop interface:

endorsements

Stay tuned.

I may eventually like endorsements, but one step at a time for me to warm to them.

I do believe LinkedIn is thinking more widely and seeing new ways of portraying data, which is needed, and will culminate in the new user interface.

This is one sneak peek of what is to come soon.

So now is a good time to cull through endorsements and delete endorsers from skills they do not know you have.

I wrote a how-to on this topic in an earlier blog post which you can find here.

Start your engines.