How Recommendations Can Help You

People trust opinions and recommendations from their friends, family, colleagues, and peers. Which would you believe: a résumé or a list of great referrals that you can actually validate by investigating who wrote them? Hopefully, you picked the second choice. Your LinkedIn profile reads somewhat like a résumé, but you can bring your story to life with recommendations.

Spend time building your list of quality recommendations so people you haven’t worked with before truly understand the type of person you are and work you do. It’s like walking into a job interview with your previous bosses and co-workers behind you to substantiate your claims and validate your experience and abilities. Recommendations are even more powerful when someone in your extended network sees that you have been recommended by a mutual connection.

Still not convinced that recommendations can help you meet your goals? Here are five common examples of ways that recommendations help LinkedIn users:

• A hiring manager has to choose between you and another applicant. Your LinkedIn profile has 20 positive recommendations that the hiring manager can verify, but the other applicant has none. All else being equal, guess who is more likely to get the job? You, of course!

• A potential investor is considering investing in your company. He reads dozens of recommendations on your LinkedIn profile and understands you are a safe risk based on credible past achievements.

• You’re being considered for a leadership role in a new organization. The hiring executive sees that you have recommended many of your previous colleagues and subordinates on LinkedIn and understands that you actively recognize your team members and give them the praise, recognition, and motivation they deserve, which is an essential leadership skill.

• A person is looking for an individual or business to work with on a specific project. She searches LinkedIn profiles using related keywords. She also selects the industry and some other criteria and sorts the results by Relationship + Recommendations, bringing your profile with many recommendations closer to the top of the results list than profiles with few or no recommendations.

• You receive a recommendation. Once you have a recommendation, you can be included in the Service Provider Directory (discussed in Chapter 10), creating another way for people to find you on LinkedIn through Service Provider Directory searches.

Recommendations help validate your LinkedIn profile and create more opportunities for people to find you. Remember, recommendations make it easier for your profile to be found via profile searches, Service Provider Directory searches, and through other LinkedIn members’ profiles who have recommended you. That’s because when one of your connections recommends you, the activity appears in their update stream as well as in the Recommendations box on the right side of their profiles. There is no doubt that recommendations are a powerful part of LinkedIn.