A Better Way to Ask for LinkedIn Recommendations

Here are two ways you can go about getting LinkedIn recommendations on your profile:

1) Ask everyone you know (or a decent-sized subset of them) to write one for you.

2) Recommend select people you know.

I'm amazed that most people I've encountered personally take door number one. It's the easy route, it's lazy, and it's fishing for compliments. The requests are also almost always impersonal, even if they're personalized with one's name.

Yet with door number two, one comes off as generous, willing to take the time to do an unexpected favor for a connection. That connection won't always reciprocate, and LinkedIn would know the stats, but much of the time if the two people truly know each other, then the connection will return the favor.

Writing ten recommendations to get five or even three in return is a lot harder, but it's much better for relationship building.