Having a first-rate recommendation from many connections on your LinkedIn profile is a great goal, but there are a few fundamental guidelines to bear in mind before you hit the road.

I’m often asked for recommendations/endorsements by people I barely know on LinkedIn. I’m really quite uncomfortable giving a reference for someone I don’t really know, as I am sure most are.

In my opinion, this is a complete waste of time, and in many ways discredits the person requesting this.

Rather than spending time doing things that won’t result in any positive results, and often create a negative image for yourself. I have one message that I would love to share with you which I send once a year requesting a recommendation or endorsement or whenever I feel my brand needs to be revamped.

I recently sent this message to my contacts as I found myself looking for a new challenge. Thank you so much to all my colleagues who were kind enough to write such positive and flattering recommendations!

Select the contacts you consider key, personalize/customize the content and have fun, so here it is:

Subject: Hi [Insert Name], Can we endorse each other? Dear [Insert Name], I’m sending this to ask you for a brief recommendation/endorsement of my work that I can include in my LinkedIn profile. It would be great if you could include examples of results you received as a result of working with me – to save you time, I am providing you a list of skills that I utilized while employed at [Insert Company’s Name]: – Business Analyst – Business Intelligence – Business Process Management – Data Analysis and Mining – Business Strategy – e-Business – Cloud Computing – SaaS – Enterprise Software – Digital Marketing – Tableau, Salesforce, Hadoop, SQL – Spanish – LATAM Please, feel free to edit this and include the ones you deem relevant. I’d love to return the favor so please provide me with a sample recommendation/endorsement for you. Thank you in advance for helping me out with this, I really appreciate it.” Cheers, ~ Diana

If you find it difficult to write a recommendation, you might want to try free online apps (recommendation generators) that would help you with this tedious task. I personally use Endorser.

In addition to revamping your brand, a large number of skill endorsements you have will result in your profile showing up more often in search results while also being more credible and positioning you as an expert in your field.

This will ultimately help you grow your professional network and achieve any goal you might be pursuing on LinkedIn.

Start building your brand and have a blast recommending/endorsing your peers, and don’t forget to let me know how it went! I want to know how many recommendations/endorsements you got.

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