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A Formula for Powerful Recommendations

If you are going to get Recommendations to support your Linkedin job search, why not get the best Recommendations you can.  They will give you an advantage over many competitors for the same job.  Here’s a formula you can follow to make and select the best Recommendations.  

Exciting.  Most Recommendations are vanilla flavor!   People get bored reading them.  Make your Recommendations exciting.  There is no law that says you have to be “corporate boring.”  People hire people, not positions.  (Later I will show you how to get others to help you create powerful Recommendations)

Benefit orientated.  Making your Recommendations benefit orientated means adding an additional sentence that connect what you did with what someone might get from what you did.  For example, Dan did internships with three different medical practices.  These internships allowed him to see the best treatment for XYZ.

Be specific.  Make the Recommendations specific and detailed. Recommendations should present your work, your specific strengths, your responsibilities and your best qualities.   It’s much better to say “We realized a 19% increase in profits,” rather than “We improved profits.”  Avoid the “Rah, rah, Dan is great” style of Recommendations.  Readers get very little from cheerleader comments.

Credible People.   Get Recommendations from credible people’s whose opinion would be respected by the reader.  If you can get a Recommendation from an expert or famous people, you can add even more power to your Recommendations.

Short.  Keep your Recommendations short and to the point.  Use short paragraphs.   Whenever possible use your key words in the text (helps search engines find you.)

Identifiers.  Include the name, the city of the person, and their position in the Recommendations.

Thank you.  Thank your connections for their Recommendations.

Conclusion

Think of your Recommendations as a sales person for you.  Let them provide credibility and a clear message about what you have done in the past and how this will benefit a company in the present and future.

To be continued, your comments are welcomed…

Al Hanzal

Tags: Linkedin and Job Searches

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 5:21 am and is filed under Social Marketing, Web Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.