Why am I being endorsed for skills and expertise I do not claim on my profile?

I quickly realized how little value the endorsement system in linkedin was when my uncle endorsed me for Groovy. In my mind I like to think he was picking it as a personality trait and not a skillset.

Interestingly, &quot;Murder&quot; is a legitimate skill on LinkedIn. Not practitioners, but criminal lawyers advertising their expertise.<p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/skills/skill/Murder" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;skills&#x2F;skill&#x2F;Murder</a><p>The related skills sidebar is also hilarious.

I don&#x27;t think endorsements are meant to be true endorsements. If they were, LinkedIn would have written a weighted endorsement system by now (where an endorsement from someone with expertise in some field means more than, say, an endorsement from your realtor about your JavaScript skills).<p>It&#x27;s just crowdsourced tagging with a different name. This way, recruiters who pay LinkedIn $10k&#x2F;yr can more easily search profiles for keywords.

I&#x27;d think this is pretty straightforward.<p>The real business of LinkedIn is selling services to employers and space to advertisers [0].<p>The more data points they have on each user, the more numerous results they can return to recruiters and more specific targeting they can do with ads.<p>Endorsements are a way to easily, indirectly expand a user profile by turning the additions into 1-click suggestions and consents rather than requiring real action by the user.<p>If it were socially acceptable I expect they&#x27;d ask users to upload profile photos and estimate salaries for their connections too.<p>0: <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/08/01/linkedin-q2-earnings-revenue-beat-street/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;tomiogeron&#x2F;2013&#x2F;08&#x2F;01&#x2F;linkedin-q...</a>

I have a similar problem: I am endorsed for skills that I do claim on my profile by people whose endorsement I do not want. You can remove individual endorsements without removing the skill itself. Here are the instructions a friend of mine found for this:<p>Login to LinkedIn; Hover over &quot;Profile&quot; and click on &quot;Edit Profile&quot;; Scroll down to &quot;Skills &amp; Expertise&quot;; Click on &quot;Edit&quot;; Click on “Manage Endorsements”. It is not highlighted but it will accept a click when you hover.; Click on the skill where you want to remove endorsers and then uncheck any endorser you want to remove.; When you’re done, click on “Save”;

One of my friends had everyone endorse him for &quot;knitting&quot; and &quot;problem gambling&quot;... The fact that these are even options is laughable.

We actually had an &quot;endorsement war&quot; between my coworkers last week.<p>Some of the results: Memes, Poetry, Salads (ten endorsements!), Tree Identification, Punk, Pickles (not to be confused with Cucumber), Shampoo, Extortion, Glitter Tattoos.

I recently just bailed on Linkedin. I was getting zero utility from it, and didn&#x27;t see any possible future where I would. I ache to pull the trigger on Facebook as well, but the longer I wait the more entrenched it becomes for my family.<p>EDIT: removed superfluous &quot;the&quot;.

A former coworker of mine endorsed me for, among things I actually do know, &quot;lubrication&quot;, &quot;flexibility&quot; and &quot;potatoes&quot;.<p>It took me a good while to notice and another good while to stop laughing. Of course a tiny bit less observation on my part could have published that to my actual profile.

I was (friendly) trolling a colleague who&#x27;s very entrenched into Java World. The troll started as a genuine attempt to suggest a new tech he&#x27;d like; Scala. Turned out he wasn&#x27;t interested at all, but the gag kept rolling about him learning Scala.<p>I got the idea that I could get a bunch of people to go and endorse him for Scala on LinkedIn. The (far fetched) goal being that he&#x27;d inadvertently accept the endorsement and end up returning in the top results for local Scala experts.<p>So I went and endorsed him for that. He didn&#x27;t fall for it. However I also endorsed other colleagues. One of them caught on the troll and endorsed me back for &#x27;Genocide&#x27; and a bunch of atrocities.<p>Maybe people are just trolls like I am and endorse OP for the sake of lulz.

The whole endorsement scam completely destroyed my trust in LinkedIn. I find that they are out soliciting endorsements on my behalf from my professional network <i>without my knowledge</i> to be a heinous misrepresentation and a horrible breach of trust. I haven&#x27;t logged in there in more than a year.

I endorse anyone who mentions these silly things to me for &quot;Natural Horsemanship&quot;.

New hobby: searching LinkedIn for developers that work at LinkedIn and endorsing them for crazy stuff.

I turned off the ability for endorsements to automatically appear on my LinkedIn profile. Instead, I highlight the skills I want to highlight.<p>The fact is your endorsements are going to trail your most recent skills by years in most cases, and so unless you&#x27;ve been doing the same thing year in and year out, endorsements present a distorted picture of your overall skill set.<p>This is especially true in technology, where your most recent skills are generally your most valuable ones.

Before I became a developer I was a banquet manager and I&#x27;ve had numerous colleagues from my former career endorse me for software skills they can&#x27;t possibly know I have. Though I do get a chuckle when one endorses me for &#x27;Java&#x27; as I always imagine them thinking &quot;yeah, he knew a lot about coffee&quot;<p>As presently implemented the endorsement system is rather pointless, but I do think there&#x27;s some potential for improvement in making it more meaningful. Perhaps make it more like the recommendation system where you&#x27;d be required to actually write something instead of just clicking a button.

They are the Facebook &quot;Like&quot; button for your career, and equally valuable.

I think the problem is that LinkedIn makes it too easy and the incentives are out of whack. LinkedIn figures out what you may be good at, and then presents it as a button to all your contacts. Brain dead simple. That&#x27;s fine, but the problem is that people are incentivized to endorse you, either because they may think it&#x27;s something nice they can do for you (and doesn&#x27;t hurt them and takes no effort), or because they may be looking for reciprocity. It&#x27;s just a terrible system.

I joined Linked In 3 months ago. Personally I did it as I was starting a new company and wanted to &quot;discover&quot; this magical sales and marketing tool I&#x27;ve been disappointed by the noise, and general low level of barrier to entry on most things. The fact that endorsements are so easy, or that making a good profile, filled with content look attractive decreases the value of it as a tool. I dislike Linked In, I wish I hadn&#x27;t joined it.

I deliberately, and almost ruthlessly enough, limit my LinkedIn connections to people I&#x27;ve worked with closely enough to evaluate each other. I really want it to be a career resource. The set of endorsements under the system as currently implemented, bears little correspondence with what those people would say about me if you asked them. This makes the data, and LinkedIn itself, less useful.

Cached&#x2F;mirror: <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ql0v0ab3FmkJ:community.linkedin.com/questions/16624/why-am-i-being-endorsed-for-skills-and-expertise-i.html+&amp;cd=1&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk&amp;gl=us" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:ql0v0ab...</a>

Here is what I would guess LinkedIn must have been thinking: Nearly everybody boasts about their achievements in their profiles and CVs, making it hard for readers to tell high performers apart from low performers. So what could be a better way than to have others vouch for people &lt;&#x2F;ironical&gt;? This is very similar to older days of websites trying to enhance their rankings by hook or crook, and Google measuring a website&#x27;s relevance by how many other websites link to it (ultimately leading to the PageRank algorithm).<p>Unfortunately, this has not worked the way they may have intended. Any widespread data-oriented company has to work hard to keep noise at low levels. A means probably intended to reduce the noise in this case has become a source of noise rather.

From the linked page comments: &quot;Marla Collins Jun 21 at 04:50 PM I personally think this is an intentional glitch LI has implemented to try and assimilate a face book type of social interaction. <i>I can tell you that the people who have allegedly endorsed me have done nothing of the kind any more than I have gone to thier profile and endorsed them after years of not really interacting with them on LI.</i> This is a violation of our trust and is turning LI into just another annoying social networking site. &quot;<p>Emphasis mine. If this is true, this is even worse than the spammy &quot;would you like to endorse?&quot; stuff.

I got one endorsement for Ruby (I have it in my profile that I am learning) despite not listing it as a skill, and I&#x27;m now occasionally getting messages from recruiters.

If you&#x27;re relying on linkedin to actually get a good job (except maybe for people just getting there first entry level job) then you need all the help you can get...

The truth is, Does it really matter. People look at your skills or skills people think you&#x27;re good at, and it allows you more breadth and job opportunities.

People love to hate the endorsement system, but I have found that while I get endorsements from people who clearly aren&#x27;t qualified to asses my skills, it still ends up such that my most-endorsed skills are actually fairly close to reality. As a recruiter you&#x27;d be foolish to use this at face value, but for doing a rough search to narrow down candidates, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s way off.

&quot;Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.&quot; - Napoleon Dynamite

Linked-in is a bit like craigslist in that it has huge network effects, lots of flaws and is hard to attack.<p>Still, I believe that there is a window of opportunity for a determined group to disrupt linked in in much the same way that Google attacked Altavista, by offering substantially better quality combined with a different business model.

having spent some time during linkedin boom in a company that separates their developers as frontend vs backend (which is moronic), i&#x27;m now labeled as frontend just because that was what i was doing during said boom.<p>gladly my linkedin profile is as useless as my gplus one (which i have to have to comment on youtube kitten videos)

Linkedin sent an invite to every person in my gmail account, hundreds of people, and was then spammed with pages of people accepting my friend request. I had no intention to do this, it was from a button that said &quot;sign in with your gmail&quot; that I must have clicked because I thought I wasn&#x27;t signed in.

I think it&#x27;s great! I&#x27;ve got a dozen recommendations for PPC if I ever decide to learn it.<p>Alright, the system&#x27;s a joke.

How to fix endorsements - rather than asking if someone has a skill, take two people in your circle claiming the same skill and ask who&#x27;s more competent at that. Repeat this for all people in your circle with that skill and you can bubble sort people into who&#x27;s best in your eyes. Next take those people&#x27;s standing within their respective circles, perhaps weighted by some measure (e.g. people working in the same field&#x27;s opinion counts more) and you start to get a good idea of how people compare to one another for the skills you&#x27;re interested in. Even if those people don&#x27;t have anyone in common you can use the 6 degrees of separation to use their connections&#x27; connections to approximate their standing compared to one another.

I&#x27;ve been actually trying to upgrade my skills as a software developer. I am currently a level 5 Wizard.<p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/pub/justin-nash/26/7aa/163" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;pub&#x2F;justin-nash&#x2F;26&#x2F;7aa&#x2F;163</a>

I just added &quot;King of England&quot; to my skills... I&#x27;m waiting to see how long it takes somebody to endorse me for that.<p>In hindsight, I should have added something like &quot;TARDIS Repair&quot; or &quot;n-dimensional Temporal Hypergeography&quot;. :-)

I am being endorsed for technologies that people in other departments think I use (which I&#x27;ve often not touched), while corporate management are busy endorsing each other for &quot;Entrepreneurship.&quot; :)<p>My most endorsed skills I have not used for years.

Does John Resig know about jQuery?<p><a href="https://twitter.com/notasausage/status/360788936282501120/photo/1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;notasausage&#x2F;status&#x2F;360788936282501120&#x2F;ph...</a>

Push-button endorsement systems are meaningless without a corresponding downvote mechanism. There have to be both sides of the coin, or else you get nothing but meaningless and empty results.<p>Of course, if you had more of a &quot;karma&quot; style system, you&#x27;d have to implement a way to mitigate abuses of the downvote mechanism. But I feel like that&#x27;s an easier task than trying to derive meaning from endorsements that cost the endorser nothing, and hence mean nothing.<p>If the stakes aren&#x27;t real, the results aren&#x27;t real.

I&#x27;m primarily &quot;endorsed&quot; for HTML5 and jQuery. While I&#x27;m good at those, they&#x27;re neither impressive to list, nor are they my core competency.<p>So I consider the whole thing a joke and endorse people for the most ridiculous things I can. Here are some of my favorites: footprints, sandwiches, trees, safety, anger, hunger, eating, money, typing, girls night, walking, Goal-oriented individual with strong leadership capabilities, MS-DOS.

In my area linkedin is quite important. However, I have been frustrated with their service for a while now.<p>One thing I really hate is that every change to my profile propagates to my whole network and to the headhunters. I am ok with spamming the headhunters, but I feel very weird having my friends receiving updates like this from me. Sometimes you are just keeping a profile updated, you are not getting promotions or something worth noting.

In all seriousness though, I think it&#x27;s a UI change they did. It didn&#x27;t seem to be this bad until lately. I&#x27;ve noticed whenever you login it asks you with a one click button if you want to endorse these people for these skills, <i>randomly</i>.<p>I think their goal was to create more &#x27;value&#x27; in their product but in fact made it less reliable and therefore less &#x27;valuable&#x27;.

For some reason, everyone endorses me for SEO, when that is the really the only type of online marketing I&#x27;ve never done.

If you were to read my profile and see my endorsements, you would think I am the master of all that is, ever was and ever will be in software configuration management using IBM ClearCase. I half-jokingly thought that my former workplace mandated everyone to endorse someone they worked with in the past for this particular skill.

A related issue I have is that they limit the number of skills to 50. What are included in &quot;skills&quot; these days are sometimes experience with very specific tools here and there. For a multidisciplinary person like me, I am tired of prioritizing what to keep and what not to within this limit of 50.

LinkedIn suggested that one of my friends should be endorsed for &#x27;pregnancy&#x27;. Well, I couldn&#x27;t resist that suggestion so I went for it.<p>I called him up the next day and we both laughed about it. He then added it to his profile. Since then he&#x27;s been seconded on that skill by somebody else, too.

What they ought to do is to give a different notation for being endorsed by someone else with the same skill.

I would very much like for someone to explain to me what the point of LinkedIn really is. I just don&#x27;t get it. Aside from your colloquial spamming, stupid recommendations and business &quot;contacts&quot;, I really fail to see who benefits from that platform aside from the investors.

I remember I once setup a js script which ran every 5 seconds and clicked the &#x27;endorse-all&#x27; button. In this way within 30-45 minutes I endorsed many of my friends of skills which they don&#x27;t even know.<p>Was good return for me as many returned back favor thinking I spent time for them.

Perhaps LinkedIn will get the message when everyone endorses each other for King of France.

I&#x27;ve noticed that people tend to endorse each other for not-so-cutting-edge technologies as a joke.<p>&quot;You have endorsed Coworker for SVN, Java and XSLT&quot;<p>Where I work, I don&#x27;t think a week has gone by without this happening. It&#x27;s all in good fun. :)

I got endorsed for Javascript by one of my undergrad professors that teaching business communication...among other equally as WTF endorsements.<p>I always sorta thought that LI was randomly generating these things somehow.

Can I just delete my LinkedIn account without performing professional suicide? It&#x27;s probably out of date, and I use it for less than 5% of what&#x27;s actually going on there.

I have a friend who endorses people for &quot;Bikini Waxing&quot;.

I find it odd when people I don&#x27;t know but I must&#x27;ve hit accept on their LinkedIn request at some point endorse me for stuff. Smh

One of the most awesome skills I regularly get ensorsed for is &quot;general awesomeness&quot; I believe there is not even a filter on it

I wrote a chrome extension for linkedin that (among other things) deletes endorsements from the dom of any profile page

That&#x27;s a good idea, linkedin! I should endorse few of my competitors for midnight poll dancing or something ...

People endorse me for stuff they don&#x27;t really know that I&#x27;m good at... I find that oddly uncomfortable.

whenever i received an endorsement for a certain skill from someone who has never seen me perform that skill i quickly remove it. recently however, after trying to remove endorsements several times, they still appear on my profile. i&#x27;ve since given up on linkedin for not providing any integrity.

I just realized I&#x27;ve been recently endorsed for &quot;fly fishing&quot; haha. That system is quite a joke.

I tried to endorse my friend for Defense Against the Dark Arts. Didn&#x27;t work. Useless I tell you.

Yes! I have people who I&#x27;ve never worked with endorse me. The endorsement thing should stop.

I&#x27;ve gotten four endorsements for &#x27;Butter&#x27;, none for &#x27;Balls&#x27; so far.

Somebody please endorse me with the &quot;Dismissive of Linkedin Endorsements&quot; skill...

My brother-in-law (an insurance salesman) endorsed me for XML. There&#x27;ya&#x27;go.

linkedin guys are either spammers or they just don&#x27;t know how to build the &quot;email notification preference&quot; thingy. I suspect they keep this feature broken by design...

i reckon linked in should have mandatory comments on an endorsement to explain why or what experience that endorser had regarding your skill.

linked in got really weird when it started suggesting to people to endorse people.

Good idea executed terribly.

Linkedin sucks.

LinkedIn has become effectively useless as an actual talent&#x2F;hiring tool, at least in my area, though it remains a pretty decent contacts tool.<p>The recommendation system is just as fictitious as the endoresements: it has been my experience that many recommendations are quid pro quo and have no legitimacy. Many come in a circular fashion so when assessing talent you need to walk through each of the players trying to figure out what their real motivation was.<p>I&#x27;ve watched the sausage being made. I remember once when we had to choose a team member to punt at one shop I worked, and there was universal agreement on the target, the team long having grievances about their productivity, poor quality product, etc. The deed gets done, and over the next week I see a several of my peers, including his highly critical direct manager (who hands out absurd recommendations like candy), author lengthy, lauding recommendations for this person. They were trying to trade in a recommendation to assuage their guilt, or for future considerations in return. This seemed incredible to me because it should be professionally damaging to do something like that, but in the real world it simply isn&#x27;t: There are no consequences or downsides to handing out ridiculous endorsements and fictional recommendations.