Week 8 | LinkedIn Presence
COLLAPSE
(Due by Sunday, midnight of your time zone in Week 8)
Request Recommendations
- A Little Help From a Friend
Recommendations add credibility to profiles.
- Review your connections
- Choose 2-3 people from whom you will request recommendations
- Send the recommendation requests via LinkedIn
- For each request, if you receive a response, choose whether or not to add the recommendation to your profile
Be specific when you request a recommendation. Provide appropriate reminders and detail about your experience together, and explain why their recommendation is important to you.
Post a copy of the request you sent asking for a recommendation.
LinkedIn FAQs
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JWI 505
Business Communications
and Executive Presence
LinkedIn | Week Eight
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A LITTLE HELP FROM A FRIEND: RECOMMENDATIONS
LinkedIn includes a feature that allows your connections to endorse you
for job-related skills and post detailed recommendations. These
professional testimonials add considerable value to your LinkedIn
profile. They act as public validation of you and your skills, attributes,
and capabilities.
These testimonials are quite powerful. Consider when you look for a new
restaurant at which to eat dinner, or when you are searching online for a
product to purchase. What is the first item you check? You check the
overall rating and the reviews or testimonials, forming at least an initial
impression of the product or service based on what others have said.
To make the most of recommendations and endorsements, you need to
have a plan for asking your connections to provide them.
PLANNING YOUR RECOMMENDATION REQUESTS
Before you ask connections to recommend you, ask yourself the
following questions:
What are the important projects on which you’ve worked recently
— the items you’d like to highlight that best exemplify your
abilities?
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§ From whom would you like to receive recommendations? You may
have friends on LinkedIn who will gladly compliment you, but these
recommendations aren’t as valuable as those that come from
coworkers, clients, managers, colleagues, and customers. Does
the person have an impressive title, or work for a high-profile
company? Does the recommendation come from someone who
knows and trusts you?
§ Look at the list of recommendations you want. Is there enough
variety in it to highlight all of your different skills and abilities?
THE PROTOCOL OF ASKING FOR
RECOMMENDATIONS
Asking for LinkedIn recommendations has a certain etiquette to it.
Follow these steps to request recommendations for your LinkedIn
account:
1. Ask by e-mail. You can even offer to write a rough draft that your
colleague can edit at will. These should be concise and should
state…
a. How the person knows you/where you worked together
b. What accomplishments you achieved
c. Exactly why they recommend you/what skills you possess
that they recommend
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2. Send the request via LinkedIn so your connection can act on it.
When you receive their recommendation, you can choose
whether or not to add it to your profile.
3. Whether you use the recommendation or not, send a thank you,
as this can be a significant imposition on a connection’s time
and effort. Thank-you notes in the form of an email, hand-written
note, or even a small gift are all appropriate, depending on your
relationship to the connection.