LinkedIn has changed again recently…
Once upon a time you
chose your key skills/ tags. You encouraged a few people you had worked with to
write a few words of public recommendation. End of story.
Yet with recent
changes, LinkedIn is encouraging members to endorse the skills on the profiles
of your contacts in a broader, less effort intense way. Whether this is a good thing or not in a
world where wisdom of the crowd arguably counts more than ever in the way we
process and trust information is debatable.
Does it make your claimed self-defined skills less credible if no-one
endorses them? What if those skills were gained a while back working in a
different context, and possibly amongst a crowd of people less digitally active
or savyy?
I don’t have the answers but the questions arise.
What’s also interesting from my observations and a few
conversations with friends. Is how LinkedIn have gone about encouraging these
quick click “light” endorsements: On a site that’s generally more serious and
functional in mindset, and all the better for not being plagued by endless
achievement based status posts from the Zynga game of the month, all of a
sudden appeared some pictures of my contacts with skills asking me to click to
endorse person X with skill Y.
There are rather a lot of parallels with many of the big
social games… easy, quick, engaging. Photos and the question “Does X know about
Y” make it hard not to at the very least entertain the thought if not
respond. It makes you think about your
contacts and is really rather compulsive… once you start and the picture/skills
tiles keep refreshing, it’s really rather easy to lose 5 minutes, just waiting
to see who / what pops up next, given some of the skills would appear to be
drawn from profile data beyond just the keyword tags.
Smart experience
design from LinkedIn at the very least.
Maybe it’s the social
gaming element that is behind the fact that so far, based admittedly on a small
panel of my friends, over only a short period of time since the feature went
live, that there seem to be more endorsements from women than men, and they are
generally fair / on occasion generous ones.
Gender bias towards
gaming behaviours and benefit of the doubt/ assumption that if they were doing
XYZ job then they must know about said subject seem to prevail.
Right, perhaps I’ll hop off and play some more. It’s rather
fun.
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