Say your friend Joe calls you up one day asking if you know a good plumber. The last time you hired a plumber, they didn’t do a very good job for you, but they are the only plumber you know. You give Joe the plumber’s name and the plumber goes out to Joe’s house to fix his leaking pipe. But instead of stopping the leak, the plumber breaks the pipe, causing a huge flood at Joe’s house. Joe is furious and wonders why you would ever recommend this incompetent person. Your reputation has taken a huge hit with Joe, and it could even end your friendship.
Recommending people on a professional level is no different. If for any reason you don’t feel comfortable recommending someone, you shouldn’t write a recommendation. Remember, your reputation is at stake here, too. If one of your connections hires someone based on your recommendation and it doesn’t turn out well, then your connection is going to lose faith in you and your credibility will suffer.
You need to carefully craft your recommendations so you are always telling the truth and not exaggerating. If the people you are recommending are the “best of the best” in their field, you can say that. If they are not, then you shouldn’t “highly recommend” them. You can always phrase your recommendation in a different way, so you are not stretching the truth but are still highlighting their strengths and giving them a positive recommendation.
WHAT TO SAY IN YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS
Here’s a sample recommendation I found in a profile of one of my connections:
Joe is always a pleasure to work with! He is extremely knowledgeable, personable, communicative, and highly effective.
So what do you think about that recommendation? Are you going to hire Joe? Do you even know what Joe does for a living or what he is extremely knowledgeable about? Since Joe is my friend and I know he is very good at what he does, I know this recommendation is completely true.
But if you don’t know Joe, this recommendation isn’t going to help you decide if Joe is the right person to hire for your project. You know Joe is a pleasure to work with, which is always a good trait if you are looking to hire some help. But what did Joe do for this person when they worked together? What skills did he use? Was it a big project or a small one? How many times did Joe work with this person? What challenges did he overcome while working on the project? These are the things you need to mention when writing a review for someone, so you can paint a complete picture for the person reading the recommendation.
Unfortunately, the above recommendation doesn’t help Joe or the person who wrote it. If you are going to take the time to write a recommendation, make sure you write a thoughtful, thorough summary that speaks to a person’s specific skill set, so others will know exactly what kind of person you are recommending.
Now take a look at this recommendation:
Melanie has been one of the biggest influencers on me in my career. I knew the first time I saw her speak at a conference that she was someone I needed to meet and model myself after. She’s incredible at seeing the big picture in order to make the necessary changes needed to create a well-oiled machine out of an organization, program, or process, while still understanding the details of the minutiae involved.
We were at different enterprise-level companies with the same challenges when I met Melanie, and the things I learned from her about how the organization needs to be set up for success, properly measuring success, creating accountability, getting the right pieces in place for all moving parts to work together to get to an end goal, and getting around the bullshit were fundamental insights for me, that truthfully, I just didn’t hear from other people in the industry.
She’s a born leader, she’s bright, she’s quick, she’s motivated, and she’s fun to be around. One of the true top players in the entire industry, who I will always intend to continue to learn from. —April 17, 2011
—Laura Lippay, Director of Technical Marketing, Yahoo!
Wow! Now that is an incredible recommendation. What do we learn about Melanie from just one recommendation? She had a big influence on Laura’s career, and Laura wanted to meet her because Melanie was her role model. (My guess is that Melanie has had a big influence on many careers.) We know that Melanie has the unique skill of being able to see the big picture while understanding the details. It’s rare to find one person with both abilities.
Laura was encountering the same problems in her organization as Melanie was in hers, so they had a lot in common. By connecting with Melanie, Laura learned how to change the direction of her organization by modeling what Melanie did.
The last paragraph sums up Laura’s opinion of Melanie: a born leader, bright, motivated, and fun. With all those attributes, it’s no wonder Melanie is one of the top players in her industry. From my personal experience, I would second what Laura said about Melanie: She definitely is one of the top players in the search marketing industry.
Laura’s entire recommendation was only 186 words long, but look at what we learned about Melanie in just three short paragraphs. Wouldn’t you love to have a powerful recommendation like this in your LinkedIn profile? Melanie has dozens of other recommendations just like this one, providing a ton of social proof that she is an A-list player. There’s nothing more powerful than your peers writing glowing recommendations about you to build up your reputation and let others know you are a true leader in your field.
WHOM SHOULD I RECOMMEND?
The best way to get started is to recommend others. If you work for a company, recommend co-workers whom you respect and appreciate. You can also write recommendations for your boss if you want to score some brownie points—just kidding! Write one only if they are a mentor to you and if you really respect the work they do.
If you own your own business, you can write recommendations for your customers or the vendors you do business with. When your IT consultant comes in and fixes your server that was down and affecting your entire operation, take a few minutes and write them a glowing recommendation. Talk about how they responded to your call for help in minutes, isolated the problem in no time, and had you up and running in less than an hour. Highlight their responsiveness, troubleshooting skills, and beaming personality. They will appreciate your thoughtfulness in taking the time to do this, as it will do wonders for their business. Someday, they may return the favor when you least expect it.
If you are a consultant, write recommendations for other consultants you work with. Let’s say you’re a web designer and you work with a graphic designer, who creates the beautiful graphics for your websites. You can talk about the different projects you’ve collaborated on and highlight their design skills, creativity, timeliness, and passion for the work. Provide as many details as you can, so you can fully demonstrate the range of their talents and expertise.
The best time to write a recommendation for someone is right after you’ve completed a successful project that you worked on together. You know that fantastic feeling of accomplishment you have after you finish a long project? You and your co-workers work long days for many months, riding the emotional highs and lows of a difficult project. Some days you don’t think it will ever end, and then you suddenly have a breakthrough that takes you to the next stage. The breakthroughs come when you work together, combining all your strengths to create a powerful team.
It’s easy to write a recommendation for someone after struggling through a long project together. You know their strengths, emotions, leadership ability, and motivations. As we saw with Laura’s recommendation for Melanie, you can write a very powerful recommendation in less than 200 words. If you write the recommendation while you’re still riding the high of project completion, it will be authentic and meaningful, which has a powerful effect on the reader. I don’t know this for sure, but I would guess that Laura wrote Melanie’s recommendation shortly after seeing her speak at an event, while she was still feeling the emotional impact of the speech.
When you are ready to write a recommendation for a colleague, you can simply go to their profile, click on the More button, and then c
lick the Recommend link. You must be connected to a person before you can recommend them. Once you click the Recommend link, you will see the screen as shown in Figure 10–1.
Choose the appropriate option, and you will be prompted with a few questions to help customize your recommendation. LinkedIn will typically ask you to identify your relationship with the person you’re recommending based on experiences like whether you were their client, they were your client, you reported to that person, they reported to you, etc. Figure 10–2 shows the complete list of choices.
FIGURE 10–1. Make a Recommendation
FIGURE 10–2. Create Your Recommendation
Next select the Position at the time of the recommendation. The drop-down list will display all the titles he has listed in their profile.
Figure 10–3 shows the next screen, where you write your recommendation. After you finish, click Send, and the person you are recommending will be notified that you have written a recommendation for them. The recommendation will not be posted in their profile until they approve it. A few things can occur at this point, all of them fairly common: They can send it back to you for revision if they would like you to change it; they can approve it as is; or they can reject it if they don’t want a recommendation from you for some reason. Remember, your professional reputation is at stake here, so you don’t need to accept recommendations just for the sake of having a lot of recommendations. If you feel you should reject a recommendation from someone, it’s probably a sign you shouldn’t be connected with that person on LinkedIn.
FIGURE 10–3. Enter Your Recommendation
After you recommend someone, LinkedIn will ask that individual if they want to recommend you in return. There’s an ongoing debate about reciprocal recommendations. Some LinkedIn experts contend that they have less value than oneway recommendations, comparing it to sharing website links on the internet. To rank highly in Google, you need a lot of links from high-quality websites to your website. In the past, webmasters would trade links so both sites benefited. Eventually, Google figured out people were sharing links to improve their search rankings and lowered the value of the links on both sites.
Some experts say sharing recommendations has the same effect on your LinkedIn reputation. Since LinkedIn automatically prompts you to reciprocate, they argue you can get a lot of recommendations by writing a lot of them, which devalues them. Occasionally, I have felt that someone recommended me just so I would write a recommendation for them. I can tell if they are sincere and writing a recommendation for me because they value the work I did for them. I do know a few people who are just looking for recommendations for themselves. After working with many different people over many years, you get a feel for who is sincere and who isn’t.
Some LinkedIn members feel a positive recommendation is a good thing, whether or not it is reciprocal. If someone feels you are worthy of a recommendation and takes the time to write it, that adds value to your LinkedIn reputation.
I’ll leave it up to you whether you want recommendations only from people who you haven’t recommended or if you want to do reciprocal recommendations. Personally, I write recommendations for people I feel are worthy of them. It doesn’t matter if they ask me to write a recommendation for them or if it’s a reciprocal recommendation.
I frequently receive requests from former employees to write recommendations, which appear in their profile under the company we worked for at the time. Again, if I don’t feel they were a good employee or not worthy of a recommendation for the work they did for me, I politely decline.
HOW TO ASK FOR RECOMMENDATIONS
I don’t generally ask people for recommendations. It’s not that I’m afraid to ask for them; I just feel that if I do a great job for them, they will write one. If I were going to ask someone for a recommendation, it would be from someone I worked closely with and respected a great deal. I would have a close professional relationship with this person, who would be among the 150 people in my network with whom I keep in touch on a regular basis.
I would write a recommendation for this person not because I want a reciprocal recommendation from them, but because I strongly respect their professional ability. Most of the time, I receive a strong recommendation in return. If the individual doesn’t reciprocate, I don’t take it personally; I just assume they don’t have time to write recommendations on LinkedIn.
If you want to ask for a recommendation, do it in a professional way. Don’t use a standard request message in LinkedIn; instead, write a thoughtful, personalized message and explain why you are asking for a recommendation at this time. You can say you are looking for a new job, for example, and you would appreciate a recommendation.
Don’t ask for a recommendation from someone you don’t know well or haven’t worked with in a long time. A recommendation about your technical skills from someone you worked with in 2003 isn’t relevant today and will have very little impact. But if that co-worker is now a CTO at a large company, you could ask them to write a recommendation focusing on your customer service skills or your work ethic. That would carry a lot of weight in your profile.
When you ask for a recommendation, mention a specific project or job you worked on together. Explain why you think that project succeeded and how well you worked together. Tell the connection what you think their strengths were on the project and ask them what they thought you did well. Also ask them to mention the specific skills or traits you demonstrated on that project and others on which you worked together.
Be very clear when you ask for a recommendation. Tell them exactly what position you are applying for and what skill set and experience it requires. You can even include a link to the job description (if you don’t think they would be interested in the job!), so they can write a recommendation that fits its requirements.
For example, if you are applying for a position as a software project manager that requires Scrum experience and knowledge of LAMP, ask the person writing your recommendation to include those skills and knowledge in the recommendation if they are familiar with your skill set. Obviously, you should not ask someone to write a recommendation for you if they aren’t familiar with your specific skills. Have them focus the recommendation on the skills they know you excel at.
Here is an example of a recommendation for a director of development for an internet business. Notice how the writer highlighted Michael’s skills in project management, software development, and technical programming languages. This recommendation clearly demonstrates Michael’s well-rounded skill set.
I worked with Michael at GS1 Canada. Michael is an excellent development director with in-depth knowledge of current software development technologies and keen sense of how to apply technology to maximize business applications. I worked with Michael on several projects. Michael is very capable at any level of software development: analysis, design, development, and support. Michael has excellent knowledge of .NET and Java development environment. At GS1 Canada, Michael made significant contributions to several strategic projects, including GDSN integration with 1SYNC. I would highly recommend Michael for any development director role.
Note how the person writing the recommendation focused on two skills: Michael’s knowledge of the products in his industry, and his ability to form partnerships to develop new streams of revenue. It’s clear this person worked with Michael and knows his strengths and skills.
If you want great recommendations like this, don’t be afraid to reach out and ask for what you want. You have more control over what the person will write when you specify what you are looking for in the recommendation. Unsolicited recommendations are usually thin in content and written in very general terms. I actually think I just convinced myself to change my personal policy of not asking for recommendations and start asking for great recommendations!
LINKEDIN ENDORSEMENTS
In 2013, LinkedIn added a new feature called endorsements, which are often confused with recommendations. The primary difference is endorsements come from
the keywords you used when you added skills to your profile. Recommendations are individually written testimonials, while endorsements can be done by simply clicking on a pop-up message that appears when you view a profile.
Figure 10–4 on page 119 shows the Skills & Endorsements section of Eric Jan van Putten’s profile. If you feel Eric deserves an endorsement for any of the skills on his list, you can click on the + button next to that skill. Notice Eric’s profile prominently features his top three skills, followed by a list of many other skills. LinkedIn has added categories for the skills in your profile. The categories are Top Skills, Industry Knowledge, Tools & Technologies, Interpersonal Skills, Languages, and Other Skills. LinkedIn will automatically categorize your skills once you enter them into your profile. As I mentioned previously, you can enter up to 50 skills, so use all of them to increase your chances of being found in LinkedIn searches.
Now Eric’s list of skills will have one more vote for each one you selected to endorse. The more votes you have for each of your skills, the higher you may rank for the skill in LinkedIn searches.
In Figure 10–4, you can see Eric’s colleagues feel he’s very skilled in online marketing, SEO, email marketing, and digital marketing. He has the majority of his votes in these skills. If Eric changes his career focus and no longer does those tasks as his primary job focus, he can rearrange the list of skills in his profile by dragging them. I did this in my personal profile when I stopped doing SEO, which used to be my top-ranked skill. I moved it near the bottom of my skills list because I wanted to show that while I was knowledgeable in SEO, it was no longer my job focus.
FIGURE 10–4. Make an Endorsement
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