LinkedIn Recommendations: Five Ways to Make The Most of Them
As potential employers or recruiters peruse your work experience on LinkedIn, recommendations from past and present colleagues can be one of the most helpful features to help communicate your value. Here's five tips for doing the most good for yourself with LinkedIn recommendations.
4. Number of Recommendations: Again, Quality Over Quantity
Some LinkedIn profiles look like infomercials if you overuse the recommendation feature. And you should not follow such a strategy, says Rosenberg.
"I've seen people have 300 recommendations," he says. "The problem is, it waters down the impact of any of those individual recommendations and you distract the reader. If you have five really important ones, they'd potentially need to get through 295 bad ones. It adds too much noise."
Rosenberg recommends no more than 10. While Dixson didn't set a hard and fast number, she said you should try to limit yourself to two to three per job.
5. Give Before You Get
It's a cliche to talk about the importance of building social capital and goodwill, but it's really unavoidable when it comes to LinkedIn recommendations. Before you can expect serious endorsements from people, it's best to go recommend some people yourself, experts say. This way, when you find yourself in need of a new job, you can rely on them returning the goodwill.
"LinkedIn is all about social karma," Rosenberg says. "So many people in their job search today will go to their Rolodex and say "gimme, gimme gimme.' But people really get tired of that. Try to give before you get, and you'll be much more likely to get results that way."
