Lately, I have been brushing up my LinkedIn profile. If you don’t use LinkedIn, I strongly recommend that you create a profile. It really is a great way to keep in touch with professional and business contacts and build your professional network.
LinkedIn has a couple of different tools you can use to vet the work, skills, and abilities of your contacts: Endorse and Recommend. Endorsements allow you to either click on skills that already appear in your contact’s profile or enter in new skills. This “endorses” the skills that appear on your contact’s profile; other people will see your name and photo beside that skills. It effectively states that you agree that the contact possesses those particular abilities.
Recommend is an even stronger tool. It lets you write a few sentences describing the work and abilities of your contact; you can describe what it is like to work with this person, how having them as a colleague or business associate has affected you, and how they will benefit other employers or clients. It is like a mini-referral. Recommendations appear under the relevant work title of the contact, which puts the recommendation into context. You can send messages through LinkedIn requesting recommendations from other people and post recommendations to anyone in your contacts list.
As you can tell, I’m a fan. The only problem is that LinkedIn’s current interface makes it tricky to find the Recommend function. I’ve had several people ask me how to do this, so I’ve created the following tutorial to guide you through the process. Enjoy!
Note: For best viewing quality, watch the tutorial on YouTube using the ‘Large Player’ setting.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikwCqS8SoXc&w=420&h=315]
Are you a LinkedIn user? If so, what are your favourite features?
