A picture I see daily when I login to LinkedIn: Mr. ABC recommends Mr. XYZ and right under Mr. XYZ recommends Mr. ABC. The first writes how the guy was a great employee / contractor and in less than an hour the other one recommends his former boss / customer. And do not forget to include a lot of superlatives likes: phenomenal, amazing, rare, one of the few etc.
I was actually thinking about some screenshots to illustrate that but I do not want to insult anyone :o)
Would you trust such recommendations? Do people really think they have any value? But still, I see such scenarios almost daily. I still do not understand why people recommend someone just because the person asked them to do so. You can always ignore the request or politely decline. What happens is that you logically adjust your respect to a person that recommends someone you know and about whom you think is a schmuck.
Recently I got contacted by a lady I once met about 8 years ago in a pub, asking me about recommendation. I politely refused since even if I know her, I actually never worked with her. She replied that it is OK, that she understands, but she is trying to get some recommendations to her profile since nobody wants to invite her for interview without references.
Really? People actually decide about inviting a person for interview based on the amount of LinkedIn references? That is scary! Sometimes I also get CVs with proud statements in the intro letter like “I have 14 recommendations on LinkedIn!”. Who cares about the quantity if quality is questionable?
It’s like search engines before Google came. It was enough to have a particular word many times repeated on the page and even more times repeated in the keywords section to be displayed on top of search results. And then came the PageRank and suddenly you could really find relevant stuff on the web.
In order to make a meaning of the references, LinkedIn and other business networks need to think about some kind of “TrustRank” related to people. It could be a formula, calculated (pretty much like the PageRank) from different values from your network.
Here are some ideas about what the formula could contain:
- Probably it has to work against the principle of PageRank – the fact that someone is many times recommended doesn’t increase his/her credibility – it can just mean he/she annoys a lot of people to get recommended.
- Is should dramatically lower the credibility of people who “cross recommend” each other within a short period of time (a few hours / days?).
- It could capture people’s credibility, real achievements and reputation from other sources on the web and blend that in. I know a few people who rarely recommend anyone. And if they do, I tend to really trust them.
- If a person is recommended by a colleague or boss you could track how long they were working together before the recommendation was created.
- Recommendations closer to the end of someones job position should be also discounted since people tend to pro-actively ask for recommendations when looking for a new job (I’m not saying that is bad, just that recommendations might not have that high value as opposed to a spontaneous recommendation when someone impresses you with their job).
- The users in the network could (maybe anonymously) score and comment recommendations of other people in their network to share if they agree or not.
So far, I recommended only 2 people, both colleagues from ZOOM that I know for 5 and 8 years on respectively. You have only one reputation on the web, do you? And even deleted posts still shows in the results…
Happy to hear your comments.
Tags: LinkedIn, PageRank, Recommendations, Social Networks
November 28, 2009 at 9:09 pm |
I couldn’t agree with you more. I have actually refused to receive any recommendations from those I have recommended, and like yourself I have limited my recommendations to only a few people I know well and so I really mean what I say. Also whenever I see 500+ contacts on LinkedIn I immediately have a queasy feeling about that person, unless perhaps they are a recruiter or are in sales. I have many thousands of followers on Twitter, but only my colleagues and people I know well on LinkedIn, I consider the former a social network and the latter a reputation network. I would add perhaps another criteria: ratio of recommendations to contacts.
November 29, 2009 at 8:24 am |
Sima, the problem is that people do not differentiate between a network of REAL contacts and an address book. The value of a LinkedIn network (and by extrapolation the value of LinkedIn recommendations) is only as good as the real network behind it. And you should not expect more.
Personally, I use different networks for different purposes: on LinkedIn, I only accept connections to people I REALLY know or who are directly recommended to me by someone I trust – don’t ask how many cold connection requests I “archive” ;-)
Plaxo or Xing I use like an address book – if someone wants my contact details, they are welcome.
When I see on LinkedIn the so called “Open networkers” with 1000s (and sometime many more) connections (they call themselves LIONs for “LinkedIn Open Networkers”), I always wonder how that person could possibly recommend them?
On the other hand, while LinkedIn is a good tool to find info about people, I do not believe it is a good recruitment tool.
Enjoy this: http://current.com/items/91503521_linked-in-to-what.htm
November 29, 2009 at 3:59 pm |
Simon, I see and agree with your point but disagree with your requirement of a tool to rank. Actually you’ve got already the ranking tool: the people ytou trust. I only recommend to people I trust a lot and viceversa. That’s the tool I use to rank recommendation.
The value I give to recommendations is the same I give to a recommendation letter attacheed to a CV: depends on the person that recommends.
However, I’ve never used this to hire… I prefer the traditional way
Cheers
July 3, 2010 at 9:24 am |
I think this recommendation requirement is just another depravedness coming out from HR departments of multinationals. They have discovered a new pool of CVs and a new feature without bothering to think what it is and why it is like this. I do not wonder when I see what kind of people typically group up there.
I do not see any need for a RankPage tool. People use LinkedIn for different purposes and as they are full-fledget they should be able to judge the outcome. And if they are not, who cares? Online social networking is mostly just fun so why to overvalue it.