I’ve just received my first LinkedIn ‘please endorse my skillz and I’ll endorse yours’ mass email. It’s from someone I’ve not met, and had practically no dialogue with.
*Presses delete*
Further reading on this subject here and here
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Surely you meant block, disconnect, unfollow and delete! People don’t help themselves do they…. did you feel like responding to share how you found their approach?
I haven’t gone that far….yet. And no – I haven’t felt like responding either, I’d rather invest that time acknowledging your comment on here 🙂
Have you worked out how to turn off the emails? It’s quite a convoluted process, but I was getting so annoyed by constant “such and such has endorsed you on LinkedIn!” I finally spent five minutes working it out.
Select ‘Settings’ (underneath your name in the top right corner), click on ’email preferences’ and then ‘set the frequency of emails’. Scroll down until you see ‘endorsements’ and set to ‘No email’.
It was just another annoyance that made me wonder why on earth I’m on there in the first place.
Thank you Robert – very helpful I’m off to have a play. I still find LinkedIn a useful place to be in touch with people – though poorly thought through ideas like this also make me question what the LinkedIn crew are up to.
LinkedIn is a great tool to network with colleagues on a professional basis, however I do understand the annoyance of such emails. The beauty of LinkedIn as opposed to other social network sites is that you can only add someone if you directly know the individual.
Hi Gurdeep – yes it can be very helpful, and it is useful for building relationships. I guess these ‘please endorse me and I’ll endorse you’ approaches are inevitable, and they hardly endear people to the place.
I have decided to only endorse those people that I know well. And I wouldn’t expect anyone to endorse me just for the sake of it, either.
This reminds me of a guy who I had only met twice (at Toastmasters International meetings). Last year, he asked me to recommend him (he already had more recommendations than I have ever seen on LinkedIn). I told him that I didn’t know him well enough to recommend him for anything. His response was that the fact that we were both members of the same personal development group should be sufficient. Needless to say, he didn’t get his recommendation.
Ouch! Good story Graham, it’s odd that some people see such a weak link as ‘reason’ to ask. And then when you say no for him to come back again….? Best left alone eh.
I like LinkedIn a lot. I don’t like recommending people whose only commonality with me is that we share the same planet.
Delete – Remove – Block
Same with this LION stuff – I clearly don’t understand the logic to that one either because when would you ever use 90% of those in your open network? My LinkedIn is people I have worked with in some way, shape or form. People I could ask a question of (and vice versa of course!)
D.R.B. A helpful method.
LION – I don’t get it, do these people eat small animals and lie about in trees?
I also like LinkedIn a lot, and may have fallen into the trap of connecting with people that I don’t ‘know’ when they have invited me. In fact, the only people I have refused to connect with are people who I know, and don’t like, and there aren’t very many of those.
I often accept invitations from people based on the theory that you never know who they know!
Hmmm, interesting. I’ve started to question the standard approach when someone asks to connect and I can’t recall who they are. I ask them to remind me where we’ve met or how/why it might be a good idea to connect and I don’t recall hearing another peep. Those feel like fishing to me. I’m curious – if you don’t mind me asking, how much interesting and useful dialogue have you gone on to have through those random connections Graham?
I agree – for me, endorsements engage my reputation so I only give them to people whose competency I have experienced, or people I’d hire again or would like to work with.
I believe the Skills section is a good idea though, especially when you get to the page of the specific Skill and see other people with this skill (you can get career ideas), companies with large numbers of employees with that skill, and related skills (can give you an idea of what kind of career development you may need). It goes beyond the endorsements ! For your readers who may be interested, I wrote a post about how to use this new section to the fullest at :
http://compensationinsider.com/how-to-make-the-most-of-the-skills-feature-on-your-linkedin-profile/
In the long run, I believe that having a well developed Skills section on a majority of profiles will help by being used as a search criteria so that users can identify more precisely people whom they’d like to contact, whether for recruitment, networking, business development or other purposes.