Kevin Willett explains why he is leery of endorsements found on LinkedIn

Last week I received an email from one of my LinkedIn connections asking me to endorse him for five skills on LinkedIn. He said that I would be doing him a really big favor by helping him out. When I read the email, I started cracking up. How is this helping him out? It may make him look cool with a bunch of endorsements, but how do I know they are true?

Now this is why I believe LinkedIn endorsements provide very little value. Think about this with me for a moment. When someone endorses you on LinkedIn what do you do? If you are like most of us you endorse them back because it seems like the polite thing to do. Now, if we start endorsing people that we don’t know for skills we are not sure they have, how does that provide any value to anyone?

Maybe I am in the minority on this, but I have never gone on LinkedIn when I needed a certain skill set, to see who has the most endorsements and then called them to do the job for me. So in the end I have found endorsements to be more of a popularity contest.

Please don’t randomly endorse someone hoping they will endorse you back. Definitely don’t ask people to endorse you for certain skills of your choosing. These things defeat the whole purpose of the program.

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Kevin Willett is the Author of One Connection How you can grow your business  (and change the world) one connection at a time. The business networking book is available on Amazon. Purchase One Connection on Amazon

Kevin is also the CEO of the Friends of Kevin Networking Group  and the New England B2B Networking Group. Please connect with him on social media to hear about his upcoming business networking events.