The Endorsement

LinkedIn has a feature called Endorsements.

The way it works: you list a skill on your profile — "Project Management," for instance, or "Strategic Leadership," or "Cross-Functional Collaboration." Someone who knows you sees the skill. They click a button. They have now endorsed it.

The button takes less than three seconds to click. It requires no evidence of having witnessed the skill. It does not ask when the endorser observed you managing a project, what the project was, how it went, or whether the word "strategic" is doing any real work in "Strategic Leadership." (A button that asked those questions would have very few clicks.) The button requires only that the endorser exists and has a LinkedIn account, both of which are generally true.

Your connections can endorse skills they have never seen you use. They can endorse skills they have never heard you mention. They can, if they are sufficiently committed to the process, endorse you for a skill you added to your profile three minutes ago while they were endorsing you.

According to LinkedIn, endorsements make you more discoverable.

Employers search for candidates with endorsed skills. Recruiters filter by them. A person with 42 endorsements for "Data Analysis" is surfaced above a person with 12. The number 42 reflects, in some sense, how many people clicked a button. The button, in full, is what 42 means.

The economist who studies credentialing has a word for this. (I do not know what the word is. The word has a slightly accusatory tone. There are probably papers.)

The endorsement has become, in the years since LinkedIn introduced it, a standard feature of the professional identity. You have skills. The skills have been endorsed. The endorsement means something in the sense that a number higher than zero means something — it is not nothing. Whether it is anything is a separate question that LinkedIn has not, to my knowledge, convened a panel to address.

LinkedIn has one billion members. A meaningful percentage of them have endorsements for "Strategic Leadership." The question of how many of them have been observed leading anything strategically is not tracked. The endorsement of strategic leadership is considerably easier to acquire than the strategic leadership. This is the system working correctly.

There is a solution to this. The solution is to click fewer buttons. The solution has not been adopted, because the person with 42 endorsements will continue to surface above the person with 12, and the person with 12 will eventually also click a few buttons. The buttons get clicked. The endorsements accumulate. The word "strategic" appears in an increasing number of profiles every quarter.

The system is fully operational.

LinkedIn announced it currently has one billion members. I mention this again because I remain uncertain whether the first mention conveyed the appropriate tone of wonder.