Many believe that the endorsements, given by others, of your skills on your profile, are next to worthless. Following several acquisitions of companies in the artificial intelligence (A.I.) space, LinkedIn has been incorporating some of the technology into upgrades of its platform. This includes looking to make the endorsements of skills more relevant to those viewing your profile.
We all appreciate the value of a solid recommendation from a colleague or client. If you are not sure what that entails check out a previous blog post on this – Finally building your personal brand through great recommendations. Problem solved.
But what about an endorsement? According to LinkedIn, this is important because people with at least five skills listed on their LinkedIn profile receive up to 17x more profile views.
However the school of thought by many experts has been that because it was so easy for others to endorse your skills, and LinkedIn regularly prompted you to do this for your connections, it devalued the whole feature.
Now using the A.I. technology LinkedIn has announced this month that it analyzed all the skills. This, they say on their blog, has resulted in;
“We’ve made endorsements smarter by highlighting endorsements that matter most to the viewer so you always look your best. For example, viewers will see endorsements made by mutual connections, colleagues, and people who are knowledgeable about the skill.
We’ve improved targeting to suggest endorsements to connections that know the skills and your work best. This means the right connections are much more likely to validate you for the skills that you want to be recognized for.
Now, when someone views your profile, they’ll only see the most relevant endorsements for the skills you want to highlight. With more than a third of hiring managers spending more than 60 seconds browsing your skills and endorsements, we want to make sure they’re seeing skills and endorsements that best represent your aspirations and help you stay ahead in your career.”
ACTION TO BE TAKING:
Go to your profile and the skills area to check that your skills are listed in order of the strengths you want to highlight. The skills can be moved around into the order that you want, and are not dictated by the number of current endorsements. If the system does not recognize a new skill you are looking to add in you can still list it as all skills are customizable.
Apparently then the system will do the rest in terms of highlighting relevance and to the right people.
For a full overview of Skill Endorsements go to the LinkedIn Help area here.
Do you have a LinkedIn question? Let us know and we will find the best answer for you and may even include it in an upcoming tip.