FT.com
August 18, 2013 4:45 pm
Lucy KellawayBy Lucy Kellaway
Both skill inflation and sucking up are rampant on the
social network
Last week I visited my moribund profile on LinkedIn to find
at the top of the page a message that said: “Your connections Dominic, Louise
and Clive have endorsed you for new skills and expertise.”
The three of them evidently think I’m pretty talented, which
is nice to know. Variously they attest to my possessing seven skills:
newspaper; magazines; journalism; copy editing; business journalism; editorial
and newspapers.
This would be flattering were it not for two things. The
first is that I’ve never heard of any of them, let alone worked with them. The
second is that half the things they cite aren’t skills. Newspaper – either in
the singular or plural – most certainly is not a skill: it is a dying product.
Copy editing is a skill but, alas, it is one I don’t have.
Of all the things about LinkedIn that I do not understand,
this craze of “endorsing” one another’s “skills” is the most baffling.
It’s not just Dominic, Louise and Clive who are
indiscriminately pressing the endorse button. Since the feature was introduced
last September an orgy of endorsing has been going on. By December, 550m
endorsements had been made and as of the end of July the number had reached
2bn. Every week 50m more are being handed out.
In theory, it could be jolly useful to have a way of rating
colleagues for their skills. It would mean being able to see at a glance how
good people were at certain things – making us all better at getting the right
person into the right job.
In practice, it means nothing of the sort: it is moronic,
irritating and serves no purpose at all – apart from proving beyond a doubt
that the tens of millions of endorsers on LinkedIn possess two skills in
particular: brown-nosing and time-wasting.
Yet the system is being taken worryingly seriously.
According to LinkedIn, your profile is four times as likely to be viewed when
your skills have been endorsed.
There are some obvious things wrong with this. For a start,
half the people doing the endorsing don’t have the first idea if you have the
skills or not. Or they are your mother-in-law. Or they only want to endorse you
if you endorse them back.
The next drawback is that there is only room for endorsing
and none for doing the opposite. There is no “denounce” button on LinkedIn. You
can remove an endorsement you have already given, but that is as far as it
goes. An acquaintance tells me that a colleague was recently fired for utter
incompetence and laziness. But his profile showed a string of endorsements from
friends and camp followers, and no possibility of disagreeing with any of them.
Worse, the string of tiresome notifications saying that
“so-and-so has added a new skill” is not balanced by messages saying that
so-and-so has just subtracted one. I ought to be able to tell my contacts that
the skill I used to have in mental maths is now sadly atrophied and that my
previously workable French is now almost non-existent. LinkedIn seems to have
no interest in such things.
Then there are the skills themselves. It is not just
Dominic, Louise and Clive who are unskilled at spotting what a skill is. I see
that 66 people have endorsed Jeff Weiner, the website’s chief executive, for
having a skill called “LinkedIn”. Which makes no sense at all.
There is the further difficulty that even with more bona
fide skills, such as “team leadership”, it is not clear what it means to have
them. LinkedIn could learn something from the Girl Guides, which for the past
100 years has operated an excellent system whereby you only get the badge if
you can prove you have mastered the skill.
For example, “team leader” – which is now a Guide badge,
along with cooking and first aid – involves following a rigorous seven-step
process of theory and practice. There is no room for skill inflation or for
sucking up.
By contrast, on LinkedIn both are rampant. Two of the most
endorsed skills are “strategic planner” and “public speaker” – skills that in
real life are possessed by hardly anyone. In my whole life I’ve only come
across a couple of dozen executives who are really good at either; telling
people that they are good when they are not is not just dishonest, it’s
dangerous. It could lead to foolish strategic decisions and it encourages the giving
of too many tedious speeches.
Yet the biggest failing of all in the endorsement system is
that it turns out to be only for the little people. Barack Obama, Sir Richard
Branson, Arianna Huffington and Angela Ahrendts have shut down this feature on
their LinkedIn profiles. They are too grand to have any skills at all.
lucy.kellaway@ft.com
No comments:
Post a Comment