LinkedIn Endorsement

What it actually is

An endorsement is a single click. A connection lands on your profile, sees a list of skills like "Sales" or "Negotiation," and taps the plus sign next to one. LinkedIn's own prompts often generate these automatically, suggesting skills to endorse based on someone's profile or mutual connections. No typing, no thought required, sometimes no real relationship with the person at all.

This puts endorsements in the broader category of reputation marketing, the practice of building credibility through other people's words rather than your own. The theory holds: prospects trust third-party claims about you more than your own claims, because a stranger vouching for you has nothing to gain (source: CopilotAI). The problem is that an endorsement carries almost none of that third-party weight, because it requires almost none of that third party's effort.

Why it matters less than people think

Here's the misconception: sellers sometimes treat a profile stacked with 99+ endorsements on "Sales" as evidence of credibility. It isn't. A buyer doing due diligence on a rep or a vendor's team can't tell the difference between an endorsement from a former manager who watched you close deals for three years and one from a college acquaintance clicking through a suggestion queue. There's no context, no story, no specificity. It's a number, and buyers doing real vetting know numbers like this are gameable.

Compare that to a written Recommendation: a paragraph, attached to a name and a role, describing what someone actually did and how it went. Recommendations require the endorser to spend two minutes writing something they'd be embarrassed to have be false. That friction is exactly what makes them worth something. Endorsements have no friction, so they signal nothing.

How this should change what you do

If you're building out a LinkedIn profile to support outbound or account-based selling, don't spend energy chasing endorsements. They cost nothing to get and buyers correctly price them at zero. Spend that energy instead asking former clients or colleagues for two or three sentences of written Recommendation tied to a specific outcome. In B2B selling, where the whole point of LinkedIn activity is to support named-account conversations and move a deal (source: Skrapp.io), the currency that actually moves a buyer is specificity, not skill-tag volume.