July :: 2006 :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

In co-authoring the book and podcast series LinkedIn for Recruiting with executive headhunter and recruiters’ coach Bill Vick, I was struck by the number of recruiters who are also bloggers. When I decided to do some research on this, Bill pointed me to the expanding blogroll at John Sumser’s interbiznet blog.

One of the first blogs on that list to catch my eye was Glenn Gutmacher’s Advanced Online Recruiting Techniques and in a piece of serendipity the most recent post was about endorsements on LinkedIn. Serendipitous because Glenn was one of the interviewees for LinkedIn for Recruiting and also because I’ve lately been thinking I should get up to speed on providing endorsements for some colleagues on LinkedIn.

‘Endorsements’ are one of the special features of the LinkedIn. According to LinkedIn, users with endorsements on their profile are three times more likely than other users to be found in searches.

I’m grateful that I’ve had some very agreeable endorsements and I do have some room to improve in providing endorsements for others (just how long can a ‘to-do’ list be?).

But soberingly, it looks from Glenn’s post that LinkedIn endorsements are not always sought or given responsibly. And in the recruitment field, this could create very problematic or even annoying situations. Glenn is commenting on Dave Mendoza’s post, The Significance of Being…Endorsed. Glenn’s post is fairly tough on LinkedIn, but I believe there are some things we as members (or ‘users’ as LinkedIn calls us) can do to help safeguard and build the value of endorsements. In this regard, Dave’s post lists some rules he developed, in discussion with Shally Steckerl, about LinkedIn endorsements and observes:

Endorsements are powerful tools which, when used wisely and sparingly, benefit your recipient and have a positive effect on your personal brand.

I would endorse that .

The comments on Dave’s post, led off by Shally Steckerl (who was also interviewed for our book), are well worth reading, a nuanced and informative conversation, with implications that go wider than the recruitment industry and touch on the whole area of social networking for professionals.

Aaron Barlow in his post Let Me Put That In Context, on TPM Cafe, observes:

Perhaps one of the side benefits of the blogs will be the re-emergence of the public intellectual. Such people, usually specialists in one field but writing much more generally, once provided a great deal of the context for public debate.

The sort of people he’s talking about are not the ‘experts’ rounded up by television programs for a 15 second grab on matters of current importance. He’s talking about heavyweight intellectuals in various disciplines discoursing on a range of cultural or political or social issues which may not, and often are not, within their specific professional or academic ‘discipline’. People like Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, John Dewey and B.F.Skinner.

He points out that if intellectuals are willing to learn more about communicating in the public sphere, blogs give them an excellent way to develop and hone their skills and build an audience.

I believe he is right and I hope the intellectuals won’t be put off this sort of approach by reading too much about what bloggers and blogging consultants like me tend to tell people about the ideal length of a blog post.

Darren Rowse says (and this fits with the impression I have of ‘what people say’) that ”the general opinion seems to be that a page of at least 250 words are probably a reasonable length. Similarly, many advise keeping pages under 1000 words.”

Not much scope there, surely, for an intellectual to stretch her or his wings? I know, brevity is the soul of wit, and all that, but sometimes extra space is needed to tease out an idea or three.

We may need some new guidelines and I suspect they will come best from the intellectuals themselves.