By including specific skills on your LinkedIn profile you are enabling other members to see your capabilities. Your network of colleagues, peers, former classmates and even potential recruiters will be able to see your listed skills. Your connections can also endorse and vouch for you, which will help to improve your credibility. Now the only question remaining is: are you ready to get your LinkedIn Skills Endorsed?
What are skills and endorsements in LinkedIn?
Endorsed LinkedIn skills are a great and easy way to recognise the professional abilities that fellow colleagues or connections have seen you demonstrate. You can add a maximum of 50 skills to your profile, from leadership to fashion there is something for everyone. Skills are a simple and effective way of building your professional brand and engaging with your network.
How do I get LinkedIn skill endorsements?
Getting your LinkedIn skills endorsed doesn’t need to be difficult. Once you’ve added a skill to your profile they can then be validated by your 1st-degree connections. Endorsements from such close connections reiterate their importance and prove their genuineness. Although, it’s important to remember that this is slightly different to the LinkedIn recommendations, which is a commendation written by a LinkedIn member to recognise your work.
An endorsement is slightly different, it’s when one of your connections endorses your skills. Not only does this contribute to the strength of your profile it also enables you to be open to more opportunities and discoverable for similar roles that are applicable to your skillset.
In fact, it’s so easy we think it can be done by following these five simple steps:
List all your relevant skills
It’s important to determine which of your core skills is most relevant and beneficial to you. You want to select ones that will be easy for connections to recognise and endorse and that will ultimately help you should you want to be hired. It can also be useful to list all of these in order of most to least important, to help prioritise the ones you want to be seen more.
Think like a salesperson
It’s worth starting to endorse the skills of your colleagues, clients and even prospects, for many their colleagues are the first option. By endorsing the characteristics you’ve seen them demonstrate in the workplace they are more likely to reciprocate this. Endorsing others will also make them feel more comfortable endorsing you.
Endorse your fellow professionals
After endorsing your closet colleagues you can begin to endorse those in your wider circle. Whether that’s someone you met at a workshop, vendors, clients or freelancers, it’s all about widening your network and building those working relationships.
Make sure you ask for endorsements on LinkedIn
Asking for endorsements can feel like the hardest part. It’s difficult to navigate not sounding like you’re desperately pleading for validation. Instead, you want to subtly remind connections of your contributions. Perhaps on shared projects, for example. You can ask that they comment on this by using a skill endorsement. This can feel like a more natural approach and can be easier to phrase at construct in a message than the dreaded “Please endorse me”.
Make updates and make sure to link to your social media profiles
LinkedIn is one of many popular social media platforms but for some, it’s not the go too for regular posting. This is something you can use to your advantage. By posting regular updates and linking to your other platforms, like blogs or websites, you’re likely to appear more frequently on your connections feed.
Plus, if you’re sharing insightful quotes and content-rich posts that are related to the LinkedIn skills that you’ve specified; your connections will have no excuse but to endorse you!
Be polite
As is true for many things, a thank you goes a long way. It can be easy to get distracted by the influx of endorsements you’ll be receiving but it’s always polite to thank those that have taken the time to endorse you.
Do endorsements matter on LinkedIn?
Recruiters will use LinkedIn pretty extensively, which is why it’s so important to utilise the Skills and Endorsements section. It’s a great free tool that can help you rank higher in search results on LinkedIn. Especially if you have a greater number of endorsements for the skill that the recruiter is seeking, so be sure to use this to your advantage!
