Bravo, LinkedIn for taking a major step to preclude the all-too common, easy way that some well-meaning connections endorse you for all (or far too many) skills, whether they know you possess that skill, or not. LinkedIn made a smart change to thwart these mindless endorsements.
Background: it’s become evident to me that LinkedIn is thinking harder about making our skills more searchable and realistic. And as I teach at professional practice firms and at bar associations, this reliability quality is becoming a major point of assessing what I call our “truth-in-profile.”
What’s changed and how does this new procedure work?
Let’s say you want to endorse a connection for her skills in social media. {and this part you should know: find her on LinkedIn, open her profile, scroll down to her skills and open her listed skill in “social media”} and you will see:
Being honest here, grade her for that skill, then you select from the drop down box how you know her for that skill (be flexible here as not all relationships will fit tidily), then you submit your skill endorsement. She gets a message and an email saying you endorsed here, and hopefully, she will thank you for the kindness.
So what if the response is anonymous and not shared with the recipient? {Perhaps one day LinkedIn will share this with the endorsee.)
This is enforced behavior modification for (what I call) “promiscuous” endorsers. Easy, and still fast but requires the endorser to work and think a bit more, and be forthright in identifying the quality level and way he or she knows you for your skill.
I suggest you take a hard look right now at every connection who has endorsed you for every skill to date, and determine if (or not) you want to leave them as an endorser, or if they should be culled out.
My charge to you: maintain a high quality reliance a reader will have when perusing your profile, skills included.
