How To Add LinkedIn Recommendations from Non-Users

As difficult as it is for us die-hard LinkedIn fans to understand, there are still a lot of hold-out professionals out there who have not yet joined the online networking revolution.   One of the greatest value-added features of your LinkedIn profile is that it offers the opportunity to add other voices that support the credentials you provide.  Including recommendations from others helps potential employers reading your profile to see the benefits you bring to your work in action.

The problem most job seekers quickly encounter is that in the world of all your business contacts, only a sub-set of them know you well enough to write an effective recommendation of your work.  Beyond that filter, only a sub-set of those qualified individuals are active LinkedIn users.

If your A-list, would-be recommenders are not on LinkedIn, do not despair.  Lucky for you, there is still a way you can include their words on your profile.  Start by trying to explain to your contacts the value you find in LinkedIn and hope they follow suit.  If that fails, ask your contacts to write a few sentences about your work and send them to you electronically.  From there you can paste their quotes directly into one of the open text fields on your profile (ideally in the “Summary” section) and format the remarks with quotation marks to indicate their external source.  Your past performance reviews and letters of recommendation are excellent sources of at-the-ready recommendations you could add.

To see this technique in action, check out the profile of my colleague Anne Messenger.  Despite the fact that her profile includes a healthy number of “official” recommendations, the direct quotes in her Summary section add an immediate “Wow!” factor to the page.

 

Michelle St. Onge

~Michelle