Skills & Endorsements

Welcome to episode 165, this week it’s that old nugget again…Skills and their annoying little brother endorsements!

But first……

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week One third of respondents to a recent survey said they lie about themselves in their LinkedIn profiles Relay have now updated their LinkedIn cover templates LinkedIn Deprecates it’s Groups API Get Ready to Give Up on LinkedIn for Marketing - Good riddance! The New recommendations settings are awful!

• Notifications could be about to improve
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• Has the new UI attracted a higher number of premium users? Research from Chris Zaharias would suggest so.

Skills & Endorsements. A valuable feature or a waste of space?

Skills have been with us for over 5 years now and they still frustrate me. What exactly is the point? Endorsements are even more irritating, a senseless action in my view but I know my views are not ones that everyone agrees with so I thought it worth exploring the real benefits of skills and endorsements. I searched the internet and found these two articles about the subject.

The Case Against

The first article is by Neil Patel and pretty much summarises everything I hate about skill endorsements. Whilst his intention is to highlight the positive aspects of endorsements he actually does the exact opposite! It’s clear that this guy is all about pointless numbers and he places no value on quality whatsoever..then again he is an SEO expert so what can we expect! This attitude is surprisingly prevalent and articles like this are extremely popular. The idea of ‘hacking’ endorsements is utterly ridiculous and has led to an increasing irrelevance of the feature. Wildy endorsing anyone you can, for any skill (who cares what) just to encourage them to reciprocate is frankly infantile and there is no proof whatsoever that it actually improves your effectiveness on LinkedIn. How to Get 99+ Endorsements on All Your LinkedIn Skills

The Case For

This is more difficult for me so I have asked some of my LinkedIn training buddies to help me out plus I found this article from a very well respected LinkedIn expert, Wayne Breitbarth

Are You Still Confused by LinkedIn Skills and Endorsements? I don’t personally know Wayne but he is highly regarded and puts an interesting argument forward for Skill endorsements.

Some other benefits; Keywords. I have found little evidence to support this but some people believe that endorsements ‘power boost’ the value of a skill as a keyword. Essential for jobseekers as people with Recruiter accounts can filter their search by skills. I doubt they do, but they can! Credibility. It’s possible that someone will read your profile and scroll down to your skills and study who has endorsed you. I doubt it but I can’t deny it’s possible. Engagement. If someone endorses you it gives you an opportunity to thank them and start a conversation. This one makes perfect sense to me. Dopamine effect. If you endorse your connections it might make them feel good and why wouldn’t you want to do that? (fair point) Research. They allow you to see who a target/prospect has been endorsed by - these people must be connections so that might give you an opportunity to get to know them and potentially use that relationship to help you get into that prospect. This is actually the smartest use of endorsements I have ever heard (props to Marcus Boswell) My Conclusion

By all means have skills and let people endorse you and maybe even endorse other people if they are someone you want win favour with. Are they important?…..NO! The only way endorsements could have worked is if they had made them an extension of a recommendation so that when someone recommended you they were asked to endorse your skills. This would have meant...