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LinkedIn Promises To Bring Order and Meaning To Your Useless Endorsements (qz.com)
Oliver Staley, reporting for Quartz: LinkedIn's endorsement feature has never felt like the most trustworthy of sources. Rather than a panel of star witnesses who can honestly vouch for you, it more often seems like a random assortment of friends, acquaintances, and opportunists hoping for an endorsement in return. LinkedIn has recognized the problem and is trying to address it by creating a hierarchy of endorsers. Instead of all your endorsements having equal weight, the site will highlight people who might actually have some claim on knowing you, such as former colleagues and classmates, or who have credibility in the field. The goal is to make the feature more like the real world, where you ask for recommendations from people you trust or are in a position to know, says Hari Srinivasan, head of the LinkedIn team developing the feature. "If you want to find a good designer, you ask other good designers," he said.
A few years ago, I got a network request from the college-bound daughter of a client of mine. I thought, "Oh that's nice. She's starting early to build her professional network." So I clicked the acknowledgement. I then got a message stating something like, "Great! We'll notify her that you are interested in joining her network!"
I don't know if that was the exact wording, but the message made think there was an AI at work trying to make connections on behalf of the girl, and that because I responded, it would send my request to her out of nowhere. So she's 18 and I'm 40, and now I look like some kind of creepy stalker.
I haven't used LinkedIn since that day. It's just as well. I see little value in the site. To me, it's just a tool for head-hunting companies to spam me with requests to hire me or help the recruiter find someone who has my skill set and qualifications. Yeah, I'll get right on that.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
I created a LinkedIn profile in 2008, when I lost my last tech job. Initially, it was okay, but after I became a recruiter, the experience went downhill.
For starters, LinkedIn refused to let me have multiple profiles, stating that it violated their terms of service. I wanted to keep my old profile, but also open a new one for my recruiter profile. Reason? In my old profile, I had links to my actual colleagues, and was limited to them and a few recruiters who I thought at the time might help with finding jobs. (Looking back, I'd have done well to avoid the latter.) I didn't want to broadcast the jobs I was scouting for to them, since it would be totally irrelevant for them. Since I couldn't do that, I deleted that profile and created a new one, solely for recruiters, losing the contacts I then had.
Also, in the past, I would write recommendations of colleagues, and they'd return the favor. Okay, it was a bilateral back-scratching exercise, but at least, we knew each other and could actually vouch for that. The endorsements, by contrast, are done by people who have no clue about what you do. I see that in the endorsements that I get - Business Development, Management, and a whole bunch of stuff that I've never touched. I recently just deleted those skills from my endorsement list and pared it down to just what I've done.
Only reason I have a LinkedIn account at all is that my employer requires it. Or else, wouldn't bother.