I’m a good Cardiac Surgeon. At least my friend Dave Dolton on LinkedIn thinks I am. Dave endorsed me as a Cardiac Surgeon to prove a point, the point being you can endorse any LinkedIn connection for any skill, no matter how incorrect or far-fetched it might be.
I am not a cardiac surgeon and my attempts to be one would be I’ll advised. I also don’t consider myself to be an expert at Strategic Partnerships, though I have been endorsed for that twice, once by a person who barely knows me and has never, ever worked with me on strategic partnerships.
These endorsements devalue LinkedIn. Recommendations are great. They take some thinking to do and the recommender will be quite visible, so people take them seriously. Endorsement are like a Foursquare check-in – they take seconds to do and are just for points. They seriously lower the bar.
Yelp has this right for restaurant reviews. You can’t just give a restaurant 4 stars and move on, you have to write a couple of sentences. LinkedIn should be the same, which it is for recommendations, but not for this game of endorsements.
Carolyn Goodman recently tried to see if having many endorsements for a skill makes a person me more of an expert than, the guy who only has a few endorsements for that same skill. It didn’t seem to be taken into account in LinkedIn’s algorithm.
So if LinkedIn isn’t using this, why should we? What’s the point of the endorsement tool? If it’s not being used to rank order skills for those who are searching for that kind of help/expertise, then why offer it? (If you want to turn them off on your profile, this will help you do it.)
by 