Form Your Own Futre: Why Should You Care About LinkedIn Endorsements?

Did you know that adding skills to your LinkedIn profile gives you 13x more profile views compared to people who don’t have them listed? Aside from the fact that recruiters can search for people with specific skill sets (source), LinkedIn skill endorsements are a great way to establish yourself as a well-rounded professional. You just have to play the cards right.

Increase Your Chances For Hiring

Let’s make it straight – even the best LinkedIn profile alone, won’t land you a dream job. But according to LinkedIn’s research, adding specific skills can actually increase your chances for hiring. Their latest report based on recruiting activities inside the platform gives us a solid, hard data we can’t argue with.

The 25 Skills That Can Get You Hired in 2016 from LinkedIn

Establish Your Professional Expertise

You can list the skills on your profile, but if you don’t enable the endorsement you may end up with a generic set of skills that looks like this:

Just take a look at how this section can be improved, by simply letting people endorse you for what you’re good at:

Source: Ann Handley LinkedIn profile

Not only does having endorsements look better, but it also serves as social proof. It’s that little extra thing that people pay attention to while making decisions. Your profile and endorsements sell your skills. Just think about it. It’s the same recommendation mechanism that works well for any retailer trying to sell their products. Make this easier for your connections by enabling endorsements in your “Edit profile” section:

See How Others See You

This is closely connected to establishing your professional expertise. You can only list 50 skills in your profile, so just add them and ask people to endorse you, or wait for your connections to suggest skills they think you have. Don’t worry – it’s always up to you if you want to add these suggestions or not.

There are people who think skill suggestions are irrelevant and treat them as a big annoyance. Sometimes it’s perfectly understandable, especially if connections that you’ve never worked with directly add some crazy suggestions like Ruby on Rails for a lawyer’s profile.

Some people endorse you based on their personal experiences with you, while others rate you based on your reputation and assumptions about you. Sometimes it can be very revealing about who your peer group really thinks you are. – Says Scott M. Soltz in this Quora conversation.

But, more often than you think, the annoyance comes from the fact that your connections think you can do more than you give yourself credit for. And this can make you feel uncomfortable. Well, guess what:

You should really embrace it as an opportunity to learn (not fake ;)) and improve. Develop the skills your connections say you have. Learn something new in the process. And after that, confidently add their suggestions to your profile.

But remember – don’t add every crazy thing that comes to their mind…

From Window Cleaning to Star Wars – it’s all there

Turns out, there are some pretty weird things you can endorse people for on LinkedIn. – says Brooke Torres in one of her articles on themuse. Just take a look at the list she’s gathered. And yes, they are all real skills LinkedIn lets you put in your profile or endorse your connections for.

Source: 79 LinkedIn endorsements you didn’t know existed.

You can check it easily by trying to add one to your profile. But do you want to do it? That’s a whole another discussion.

Start a Conversation

It’s great to genuinely connect with other people on LinkedIn . It’s great some of them want to give you credit for something you’re good at. Take it.

Even if you’ve never met them, but you see they have endorsed your skills, always say “Thank you”. Start a conversation. Not only is this a chance to deepen the connection, but also an opportunity to know why they took the time to check your profile and confirm you have the skills. You may also return the favor by endorsing someone too. But, just like Liam Neason in the video below: don’t endorse just anyone

What skills do you have listed on your LinkedIn profile? Do you use endorsements? Do you think they bring value to the platform and your LinkedIn activity? Share your thoughts in comments.