I have been a great great fan of LinkedIn. LinkedIn has frankly taught me many things in my professional career (most notably adding networks with an improved success rate) and has been quite instrumental in securing internships couple of times and a job in a tough market during my MBA period. The power of connections it imparts is out of the world. I have been using LinkedIn for quite sometime now and can easily point out that their continuous new additions have helped to a large extent. For example - recommendations feature, adding new connections only when you know the email, follow companies feature, trying their full-fledged LinkedIn premium version for a month for free, etc have all been great features.
LinkedIn introduced Endorsements some time back and I initially thought of it as a great feature to know quickly about a person's skill. But using it for sometime, I now feel that it increasingly will become a redundant feature. And LinkedIn to some extent is responsible for it. How? By simply providing a single click to endorse few skills that LinkedIn populates automatically when one person visits another person's profile. So easy and convenient to endorse.
But after experiencing this feature for sometime, I can convincingly "endorse" that this feature does not add any value as it is being use incorrectly. Sample this
And there are in fact less people who care about endorsing me with whom I have worked professionally. I believe that recommendation feature is much much useful there, rather than endorsement.
LinkedIn should do a bit of analytic behind the behavior of people endorsing somebody. A simple test would clearly answer a lot many questions. "Does a LinkedIn user simply click on the skills provided automatically by LinkedIn without even adding/deleting any skill?"
If the answer is emphatically yes (which I believe), then LinkedIn should just kill this feature. It does not help anyone. Or if kill is too far, at least remove the one click feature to endorse somebody's skills.
LinkedIn introduced Endorsements some time back and I initially thought of it as a great feature to know quickly about a person's skill. But using it for sometime, I now feel that it increasingly will become a redundant feature. And LinkedIn to some extent is responsible for it. How? By simply providing a single click to endorse few skills that LinkedIn populates automatically when one person visits another person's profile. So easy and convenient to endorse.
But after experiencing this feature for sometime, I can convincingly "endorse" that this feature does not add any value as it is being use incorrectly. Sample this
- My skills have been endorsed by people who I know personally but have never worked professionally. Why would they do that? well, probably they "believe" that I'm good in something.
- My skills have been endorsed by people who I dont know personally as well, but at some point in time added into my circle and spoken to them over email. Why would they do that? well, probably they are looking for a job change, or some information or want to do business with me or my company. So they "believe" that this could be a good starting point to interact.
- My skills have been endorsed by completely random people. Why would they do that? well, again for the same reason as 2 above.
And there are in fact less people who care about endorsing me with whom I have worked professionally. I believe that recommendation feature is much much useful there, rather than endorsement.
LinkedIn should do a bit of analytic behind the behavior of people endorsing somebody. A simple test would clearly answer a lot many questions. "Does a LinkedIn user simply click on the skills provided automatically by LinkedIn without even adding/deleting any skill?"
If the answer is emphatically yes (which I believe), then LinkedIn should just kill this feature. It does not help anyone. Or if kill is too far, at least remove the one click feature to endorse somebody's skills.
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