A little while back LinkedIn added a feature where people can endorse skills of other people . A woman who I have never worked with or even met has endorsed me for 6 skills. She did work with a friend of mine for a few years, he’s linked to me on linkedin and works with me now.
I work for a place that many people want to work for. But I don’t think she has skills we need. Is this just a very odd way for her to try to get my help in getting a job where I work? FYI my friend said she’s married so there doesn’t seem to be any romantic angle to this.
(BTW, even though many people want to work where I work, for some reason my friends don’t want to work with me and they are vary qualified to work at my place. They seem to be very resistant to change.)
Whenever you view a contact’s profile, the site pops up a dialog with some random set of the skills they’ve claimed and asks you if you want to endorse them for those skills. If you say yes, it goes through. She probably put about that much thought into it.
I get tons of endorsements from people who have absolutely no way to know if I’m good at that thing or not. It’s not a very useful feature in my view.
However, I do think that you need to actually be connected to someone before you can endorse them. Did you accept an invitation from her? Why? I get a lot of invitations because I also work at a place a lot of people want to work (and I have a skillset that a lot of other people want to hire for), but I generally only accept invitations from people I actually know. I don’t keep the bar as high as I do for my facebook account, but I don’t want it cluttered with people I’ve never met either. It’s actually a really useful tool to me, but only to the extent that I actually know my connections (and can ask them for help, job leads, etc.).
I set up a very minimal LinkedIn profile solely to keep up with people that I work with who were transferring to another city. Just my employer and position. No details, no skills, nuthin.
About a month ago I was notified that I had been endorsed by someone I know well for skills I actually have. But they couldn’t have been from subjects I had claimed because I litterally haven’t claimed any.
I also haven’t logged in to find out how endorsements work so I really don’t know why or how the endorsements are generated.
It’s probably chosen skills that other people with similar job titles had in their profile. As others have said, when you visit someone’s profile, there is a list of skills and you can endorse the person for all of them with a single click.
Also, on your “news feed”, it will show a list of four different people with a skill listed and you can endorse or close it. As you click either, it will replace it with another person/skill. However, you can only endorse the skills of your current contacts and vice versa. You can’t endorse the skills of strangers.
“Endorsed” on LinkedIn has about the same usefulness and validity as a “like” on Facebook.
I get very few invites so I accept them all. I guess she saw me as connected to my friend who worked with her.
I love the fact that this came up as a possible explanation.
Yeah, someone is greatly overthinking the way this works. I endorsed about 50 people for skills last night. It took exactly as long as it took to click the mouse 50 times (about 20 seconds). I didn’t plan on endorsing anybody for anything but the screen for endorsements popped up and I just started clicking as fast as I could to make it go away. It doesn’t mean much of anything.
Could it just be someone hoping for more endorsers for herself - if she endorses you, she might be hoping that you’ll do the same?
I remember that was part of the reason why eBay went to attaching the feedback to the specific transaction. In its early incarnation, anyone could comment on anyone else.