Office Shenanigans: LinkedIn RECreation
I can’t stand LinkedIn — while it’s nominally positioned as a social platform, pretty much every social interaction I have on the site feels hollow. Recruiters reach out with carbon copies of the same generic friend request. Vendors tap into the platform for targeted lead generation campaigns. Even genuine excitement at friends and colleagues’ career achievements gets reduced down to auto-complete recommended words of encouragement.
The thing is, LinkedIn is a platform — and that means, we can model the behavior we want to see on the site. So we’re as much to blame for the LinkedIn experience as anyone else. So for the last few weeks, I’ve resolved to be the change I want to see in the platform…by writing LinkedIn recommendations.
A Brief History of LinkedIn Trolling
Before I get to my recent experimentation in LinkedIn RECreation, let’s go back in time, to 2013. LinkedIn had just introduced the feature to “endorse” colleagues for skills, drawing on an impressively broad list. GMD Studios head Brian Clark realized that he could make a game out of this, and invented Endorsement Bombing: the art of assembling a collection of absurd skills to tell a short story.
Brian’s new hobby got featured everywhere from BuzzFeed to the Wall Street Journal, and was dubbed “the most exciting thing that ever happened on the low-fat Yoplait of a social network that is LinkedIn” by The Ringer, in an article explaining how Weird LinkedIn never happened.
LinkedIn eventually eliminated the ability for colleagues to suggest skills, effectively killing the practice of endorsement bombing. They did leave a loophole, however. As long as the endorsement bombing is self-inflicted, other people can endorse skills created in an open text field, enabling my skill at “adding really long skills to my linkedin profile” to shine.
But for the most part, LinkedIn doesn’t want the site to be a place where you have fun. It’s a place for serious business conducted by serious businesspeople.
And so, inspired by the fun I had with endorsement bombing back in the day, I turned my attention to LinkedIn recommendations.
LinkedIn RECreation: Not-So-Serious Business for Not-So-Serious Businesspeople
Since LinkedIn recommendations are subject to full editorial approval by its recipient, it doesn’t really replace the role of references. And more often than not, solicited recommendations mainly rehash the information already present in the main LinkedIn profile. So, how can LinkedIn recommendations be improved?
The answer is simple. Focus on the stories. Not stories of your colleagues’ ability to do the job they were paid to do. Instead, focusing on why you actually enjoyed working with them.
It’s amazing how many stories of office camaraderie secretly illustrate how colleagues can be good at their jobs, even when the nature of those jobs change drastically. They’re exactly the type of stories that are nice to know about, and LinkedIn is typically the worst place to get those stories.
Mostly, though, sending out a steady stream of recommendations has let me catch up with coworkers and colleagues in a way that feels much more natural. After providing heartfelt yet whimsical recommendations, I’ve sparked conversations that helped me learn personal and professional accomplishments that a mere “hey, how’s it going” wouldn’t necessarily trigger.
Mostly, though, it’s just nice to take a walk down memory lane and try and isolate a single snapshot or memory that captures my positive feelings towards someone without running the risk of disclosing confidential information or diluting the narrative with memories of the corresponding stresses work-adjacent stresses that forged the friendship.
Pictured above: LinkedIn recommendations for colleagues who used pop culture references in client decks, set up the office board game group, maintained a marquee light box at their desk, kept a spreadsheet of colleague personality types, unofficially set up my out-of-office consulting business, and ran a massive virtual gift exchange on Twitter.
