Tips For Using LinkedIn Effectively #9

The Art of Giving and Receiving Recommendations

Recommendations are way to give and receive feed back from coworkers, managers, clients and others that you have the opportunity to work with during your career. A common recommendation may be a manager giving a recommendation for a current or past employee.

The recommendation could be worded something like this:

“John is one of the more innovative and productive people that I have had the pleasure of working with. John's direct role was the manager of our Graphics and Marketing Department, but his strong abilities and teamwork attitude led him into involvement in many more areas of the company. His technical and organizational skills are excellent, and applicable to many things. John's high moral values and cooperative spirit gained him respect throughout our entire organization. I would strongly recommend John to any future employer, and I hope I get the opportunity to work with him again.”

Recommendations are associated to a specific company or listing in your work experience. I regularly speak with groups of pre-employed individuals and as a way to fill the gap in there experience, I will recommend that they list volunteer activities, these volunteer while are not a paying gig does allow for some great opportunities to receive recommendations.

One nice thing about recommendations on LinkedIn is that you have total control of what is displayed through an approval process. This approval process allows you to make sure that everything is spelled correctly and that it is painting you in a good light.

Another feature of the approval or the Management of your recommendations is that you can hide recommendations at will. This allows you to change up what people are seeing about you and may allow you to put your strongest foot forward with the best of your recommendations.

When you receive a recommendation, you can't edit a recommendation, but it is quite acceptable to return a recommendation to the person that sent it and ask them to fix a problem. Or I like to select the text, make the changes and send it back to ask that they re-post the recommendation. I have on occasion, even rewritten a recommendation to have a stronger branding of my abilities and add needed keywords to increase the overall value of the recommendation.

One of the most common questions that I am asked is, "does the person giving the recommendation have to be on LinkedIn?" Yes both parties have to be on LinkedIn for this to work.

What is the value of recommendations on your profile? This allows people or more specifically recruiters to see what others are saying about your abilities. And from the other perspective, it allows them to see what you say about others. What this boils down to is that it is good to not just receive, but to also give recommendations.

There are a number of opinions when it comes to reciprocating recommendations. You may be thinking, this person gave me a recommendation so I am now obligated to give them one. My thought on this is when someone gives me a recommendation, I like to wait a week or so to give them one back. This way you have a chance to think about what you could say and not have the instant reaction to their recommendation. It allows for your follow up recommendation to have a bit more validity.

So how do you ask for recommendations? I personally look for opportunities where someone thanks me for doing something for them. I will also use it as a way to help with customer service in my business. After completing a project for a client. I will mention that I would appreciate their feed back on LinkedIn in the form of a recommendation.

Next time we will be looking at adding to your network with invites. Until then, I would love to have your feed back on this blog. Let me know how I can help you more. Or if you have any questions that I can answer or even add as a topic for a future post. Interaction with an audience is what makes a blog a success.

NosalCentral is helping small companies around the country with a successful internet presence. Want to learn more, visit our site at NosalCentral.com.