How to manage LinkedIn endorsements

If you’re on LinkedIn, you saw this new skill endorsement feature: your friends started “endorsing” you for this and that, and you can reciprocate by going to their profiles and clicking on their skills. Unlike recommendations, it takes no time.

Problem: I started getting endorsed for seemingly random things, like “team building” or “Microsoft Office”, and it took me some time to figure out how to address the issue. LinkedIn pros of course know this already, but for the LinkedIn newbies like me, it is not easy. So here is what I learned by trial and error.

• When you visit someone’s profile, all skills are listed way down the profile – where they’re hard to get to, and usually nobody goes there. What visitors see is the blue-background box at the very top of your profile that lists only top five skills. Casual visitors will only see those five and, if they want to endorse you, they will endorse for those five only. Obviously, it’s important to have your best five up there.
• LinkedIn automatically assigns you some semi-random skills, such as “Strategic Planning” or “Coaching”, apparently based on your profile and connections. Those computer-assigned skills show up as your initial top five, and your friends begin clicking on them, endorsing you for these items, whether or not you want such endorsements.
• Since only the five most endorsed skills are shown in the blue box, once your friends start endorsing the first (random) five skills, these skills become the most endorsed, an they are now glued to the blue box, even if you try adding better ones to your list. You cannot move the top five down. It’s a vicious cycle.
• Your solution is to delete those computer-suggested skills from your list, which will make room for your more important skills. Yes, you will also lose the endorsements for those skills, but it’s no big loss. However, before you delete the unneeded skills, you need to prepare the good ones in the right order.

Now, step-by-step:

1. From your LinkedIn home page, select Profile menu and then Edit Profile. Scroll down to the skills. You will see the skills that collected at least 1 endorsement arranged at the top section – where you can delete them but cannot do anything else. Then, there is the bottom section which has skills not yet endorsed – those you can not only delete but also rearrange by dragging.
2. Add your most important skills to that bottom section, and then drag them to the front of the not-yet-endorsed list. For example, I added to my list Tax preparation and Solving IRS problems – the two things I do for a living.
3. Clear room in the top (endorsed) list, which by now can have more than 5 items. Still, you have to build a list of 5. If you need to squeeze in 3 not-yet-endorsed skills, then you have to delete all but 2 of the already endorsed skills. Choose to leave either skills that are really important or those that are very heavily endorsed. For example, I deleted all except Real Estate (which is my specialty) and Public speaking (which is not what I do for a living, but it was already endorsed by more than 20 people)
4. If you did it correctly, now the top section will contain 5 items: two that you retained from the LinkedIn-generated list plus three that should have jumped from the bottom section to the top. These five will now be presented to visitors in the blue box at the top of your profile.

Hope this helps you guys. Let me know.