Lorraine K. LeeFounder & CEO at RISE Learning Solutions

Asking for LinkedIn Recommendations

6 Apr 2022 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:39

In this concise tutorial, Lorraine K. Lee walks viewers through the process of requesting and giving LinkedIn recommendations. She first points out that the Recommendations section lives near the bottom of a LinkedIn profile, likening it to consumer review sites such as Yelp or Google, but for professional reputations. She stresses the importance of being specific when asking for a recommendation—suggesting requesters name particular strengths like responsiveness, ability to simplify complex ideas, or, for her own role as a virtual keynote speaker, audience engagement and collaboration experience. Lorraine also advises reciprocating recommendations to demonstrate a strong working relationship, addressing concerns that mutual endorsements might seem disingenuous. Finally, she recommends gathering two to three recent recommendations (from the past six months) to strengthen the profile’s credibility.

Chapters

The first thing to do is to make sure that you are asking for and giving recommendations, and you'll find this section towards the bottom of your profile. Before we go out to eat or try a service, what do we usually do? We go on Yelp, we go on Google, and we check out the reviews. This is your equivalent, except it's for you as a professional and not a restaurant. When you're asking for recommendations, make sure to get really specific. What What do you want that person to include in your recommendation? Don't just ask them vaguely to write you one. Do you want them to talk about your responsiveness, your ability to explain complex details in a simple way, your amazing questions that you come up with as a UX researcher? For me, I've recently been asking people to leave recommendations about my work as a virtual keynote speaker, and I asked for them to touch on points like how their audience responded and engaged with the session and what it was like to work together leading up to the event because That's going to be what's important to my audience, and that's what I want viewers to see when they first come to my page. You'll also want to make sure that you are returning the favor. If someone is giving you a recommendation, write one back. I've had many people ask me before whether writing one back looks kind of disingenuous because maybe, you know, that person only wrote something nice to you because they wanted something back. But I actually think it's a really meaningful way to show that you had a strong working relationship if someone can see that you both wrote each other nice recommendation. So if you can, I would try to get 2 to 3 recommendations from an experience that you've been at or had for the past 6 months to beef up this section here.