A Chief Marketing Officer in global healthcare posed a great question to me about the LinkedIn Skills profile section.
He posted the new LinkedIn content I had written for him and was aggressively leveraging all LinkedIn features that applied to him:
“Quite a few people ‘endorsed’ me on LinkedIn, but they often endorsed me for skills I did not list. Is this detrimental to my SEO strategy with recruiters via LinkedIn? Should I delete the endorsements that are not in my top 3? Does it hurt to leave them?”
Similarly, when I looked at my own LinkedIn Skills and Endorsements section a few days earlier, I realized that I had the same problem he did.
Many of my most endorsed skills didn’t apply at all to me. And the first ones in my list were not my most important ones. My list was sending the wrong personal brand message.
What Are Skills and Endorsements?
LinkedIn allows you a maximum of 100 skills in the Skills section of your profile. If you’ve overlooked this profile section and have either no skills listed or very few, it’s time to get busy.
A “skill endorsement” is a one-click way for your connections to endorse the skills listed on your profile. An “endorsement” is not the same as a “LinkedIn recommendation“, which is a written narrative that a connection of yours submits to you, in support of your expertise and value.
A high number of endorsements for skills representing your best talents supports your personal brand and adds credibility to your candidacy in job search.
Endorsements validate that you really do possess these skills, and they add value to your profile.
There is debate about how much weight the Skills and Endorsement section carries with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), compared with other critical spots for SEO, like the profile headline, job titles, name field and About section.
But executive recruiters and hiring managers use LinkedIn extensively to source candidates by searching relevant keywords.
The more your LinkedIn content is search engine-optimized − in other words, saturated with the right relevant keywords − the more likely your profile will land higher in search results for those keywords.
Your skills typically are the relevant keywords you need to get into your LinkedIn profile.
So the Skills section, when done correctly, will include most, if not all, of those keywords.
Reinforcing how important the Skills section is, career coach Kevin D. Turner noted:
“50%+ of the Companies on [In] who are recruiting new employees are using Skills as their core filter to discover candidates.”
Where do you find the right keywords for your LinkedIn Skills?
Kevin detailed how to identify the skills recruiters will use to source candidates for the role(s) you’re seeking. This feature is only available with LinkedIn Premium:
- Open your Premium feature analytics Profiles views Past 90 Days to open the [Who’s viewed your profile] page
- Click on the hyperlink in the 💡box below the graph that says “Add key skills to increase the chance you’re discovered for the right jobs. Get key skill suggestions”
- Choose your desired Job Title to get personalized key skill suggestions (always type titles slowly and select the right one in the dropdown box)
- View the top key skills found in your profile that are relevant for your desired job title
- Review the Suggested for you top key skills that are common to both your desired job title and past experience
- Click the a (Suggested key skill +) to add it to your profile
If you don’t have LinkedIn Premium, this feature makes the free one-month trial of Premium well worth taking advantage of.
Another way to uncover the right keywords for you is by researching your target employers.
How to Brand Your LinkedIn Skills and Endorsements
As of this writing, the first 2 skills listed on your profile are more prominently displayed and include the avatars of your most recent endorsers.
Pull together a list of your top 100 areas of expertise (or skills), and post them to your profile in order of importance to your target employers.
LinkedIn describes how to use Skills and Endorsements:
“Once you’ve added a skill to your profile, your skills can be validated by 1st-degree connections to reinforce their weighting. These are called skill endorsements, which are different than recommendations. When a connection endorses your skills, it contributes to the strength of your profile, and increases the likelihood that you’ll be discovered for opportunities related to the skills you possess.
You don’t need to request a skill endorsement in order to receive one. By default, you’ll receive a notification when a connection endorses one of your skills. However, you can manage the frequency of the skill endorsement notifications.
To see or manage skills and endorsements, scroll down to the Skills section of your profile. Skill endorsements are located under the associated skill. You can also re-order the display order of your skills.
If one of your connections endorses your skill, but you don’t want to acknowledge it, simply hide the skill endorsement. You can also opt out of receiving endorsements to prevent additional endorsements from your connections.”
It’s good practice to reach out to your connections individually and ask them to endorse you, to build up your numbers. Meanwhile, keep an eye on how your endorsements grow, without you asking anyone for them.
How To Fix Your LinkedIn Skills and Endorsements
The practice of regularly reaching out to connections and requesting endorsements is all well and good.
However, as the Chief Marketing Officer I noted above mentioned, your prioritized list starts shifting to accommodate the endorsements coming in.
Skills with more endorsements get listed first. Sometimes, new endorsed skills come in that are not even skills you possess. In other words, your list goes screwy over time.
Luckily, you can reorder and delete skills.
Re-order the way your skills stack up following LinkedIn’s guidelines:
- Click the Me icon at top of your LinkedIn homepage.
- Click View Profile.
- Scroll down to the Skills section and click the Edit icon.
- Click the More icon on the upper right of the Skills page.
- Click Reorder from the dropdown.
- In the pop-up window, click and drag the Sort icon to the right of the corresponding skill you’d like to reorder.
Come back every few months or so, and repeat to keep this section up to date.
- Weed out any skills that no longer apply to you,
- Add new ones that do apply,
- Reorder them if necessary, and
- Keep an eye (especially) on the first 2 listed.
Get Into the Habit of Endorsing Others
My advice for a quick and easy way to connect with your network and stay top-of-mind with them: Take the time to go to their profiles and give them Skills endorsements.
Along with requesting and receiving endorsements, get into the habit of endorsing others. LinkedIn says:
“Endorsing your connections’ skills is a way to recognize any professional abilities that you’ve seen them demonstrate. You may be asked to provide feedback on skills and endorsements. Endorsing your colleagues can also help you to maintain strong connections with the people in your network. However if you change your mind about a skill endorsement that you’ve given, you can remove it.
You can manage how you receive and give skill endorsements by updating your profile settings.”
How to endorse someone’s skills
Here’s the rundown from LinkedIn:
- Navigate to the profile of the 1st degree connection.
- Scroll down to the Skills & endorsements section and locate the name of the skill you’d like to endorse.
- If your connection has more than three skills listed, click Show more at the bottom of the section to see their whole list of skills.
- Click the + Add icon to the left of the skill.
Note: If you’re using the site in English, you can endorse a connection for multiple skills at once.
After you endorse someone, your name and picture will appear next to the skill on that person’s profile. They’ll also receive an email, if they’ve opted for it. The most endorsed skills will move to the top of the Skills & endorsements section.
More About LinkedIn and Executive Job Search
Essential LinkedIn Guide for Today’s Executive Job Search
When Skills were new, I noticed that LinkedIn prompted my connections to endorse me for specific ones. Then it noticed which ones I rejected. For example, “Cloud Computing.” My background is in the PC industry from it’s earliest days, not mainframes. After that, it began trying to get nearly everyone to endorse me for “Cloud Computing.” It even tried to get people to endorse my wife for it. (She’s proudly computer illiterate.) I concluded that LinkedIn was testing those who were endorsing me. I doubt that they have ever stopped doing it.
People need to know that they do that and only endorse skills that they have seen others actually use.
Rich, thanks for bringing this to readers’ attention. From what you’re saying, it looks like LinkedIn has their own ways of using and reasons for promoting Skills and Endorsements.
Great advice for Linkedin users old and new
Jesse, many thanks for taking the time to comment. I hope my post was helpful!