Flattery will get you everywhere...

A thank you goes out to Claudia Mills, claudia.mills@homeinstead.com, of Home Instead Senior Care, www.homeinstead.com/283, for her invaluable advice about recommendations on LinkedIn, www.linkedin.com.
At our JVS Employer Forum event last Tuesday, February 15, Claudia suggested to get recommendations on LinkedIn, first you should give recommendations.
What a wonderfully wise idea!
First seek out others who have qualities, or experience, or situations you admire. People who are working, or have worked, where you would like to work. Others who have the background, the education or training, or skill sets you find of interest. Fellow professionals or workers who are where you want to be; who have taken the journey you may need to take to get where you want to be.
Include those who have connections to those people with whom you most closely want to identify.
Then read their profiles and invite them to join your network if you already know them or have a connection in common.
Get to know them to learn what you admire, appreciate, the most about them.
And, most importantly, compose a recommendation and send it to them.
By taking these steps, you also learn about yourself.
You learn about what is important to you, what interests you and what you admire.
By finding it in others, you gain a better understanding of what strengths you have already and what strengths you need to develop.
And you take action to enlist the aid of others who have developed those strengths to show you the way.
If you need help with your recommendations or in learning about and navigating LinkedIn, attend my LinkedIn series the first week in March. Go to www.parnossahworksdetroit.org and click on the Seminars/Events tab for more information and to register.
You can also follow me and JVS on LinkedIn, the JVS website at www.jvsdet.org, and JVS Detroit on Facebook.
Or email me at wtarrow@jvsdet.org.
Recommend us to your friends and connections, especially anyone who is looking for help in finding employment or changing careers.

Some recommendations about recommendations

Regarding recommendations on LinkedIn or anywhere else for that matter.

Who is/are the target audience that you want to see, and be impressed by, your recommendations?
What do you want people to say about you that sends the right messages to, creates the right images for, your target audience?
Who can best represent, and speak to, your various work, education, and other experiences?
Who, and from where, are the people who are most relevant to your target audience?

Once you have answered the questions above, contact the people you want to recommend you on LinkedIn (they have to be members of LinkedIn to give you a recommendation). Provide them with a recommendation you scripted for them and ask them to review, edit if they want to, and send to you to be posted on your LinkedIn profile.

Offer to do the same for them.

LinkedIn prompts and directs you about recommendations under your experience and education on your profile.

Any performance review or evaluation you received at your workplaces from your immediate supervisors can provide an excellent source of recommendations. If you do not have copies of performance reviews, contact the company and ask for a copy of your personnel records.

Remember that the most preferred recommendations come from previous supervisors and other work associates including customers who can testify to your work performance.

You can also provide evidence of your "soft skills" such as interpersonal, communication, organization, leadership and the like with recommendations from non-work contacts who have been witness to related behaviours. Also, fellow workers and other contacts of yours can speak to personal characteristics of yours such as trustworthiness, reliability, honesty and professionalism.

Recommendations are simply testimony provided by others to verify and support your claims about your different sets of skills, work performance and achievements.

Your skills, work, and achievements easily could fill a book, but without the right "recommendations" on the jacket, that book may never be bought.

For help with crafting your recommendations, feel free to contact me.

And follow me and JVS at www.jvsdet.org and check us out on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. Job postings are at www.ParnossahWorksDetroit.org as well as the calendar of upcoming seminars and events.

Walt
wtarrow@jvsdet.org