Linkedin, the social network for professionals, debuted a new way to sell yourself to potential employers with Endorsements.  The new feature makes it easier for people to recognize your skills and expertise, as it allows others to recommend you for the skills you’ve listed, or allow them to put additional skills for you.  It’s a simpler version of LinkedIn’s Recommendations, which can be quite time-intensive to complete on behalf of another user.  It’s also a great way for bosses to boost employees’ egos.

As mentioned above, LinkedIn already allows you to write Recommendations for your connections, but let’s face it, those recommendations are a bit lengthy and not everyone has time to read them.  With Endorsements, your skills and  expertise are tallied in a sense, with the people endorsing you similar to a scoring system.  So it’s easier to determine if the person whose LinkedIn profile you’re looking at fits the position you want to fill.

How to Endorse

Go to a person’s Linkedin page, and you’ll notice that at the top of your connection’s profile are recommended endorsements.  From here you can choose what you think fits them.  Or if you think they have additional skills not listed on the endorsement, you can add more to the list.  There’s also an easier way to endorse your connections.  Just go to the Skills & Expertise section.

Also, if your connections endorse you, you’ll receive a notification e-mail as well as an alert on LinkedIn the next time you log in.  You can also use the Skills & Expertise section to see who among your connections thinks you’re awesome.

Ego boosters

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Aside from the Endorsement feature, there are other ways you can boost a colleague’s ego.  I’ve already discussed writing Recommendations for your LinkedIn connections, but here’s a few more ways to spread the love and self-promotion.

In order for people to notice you, an awesome resume is key.  Linkedin knows how hard it is for people to create their perfect resume, so they came up with the Resume Builder to eliminate using the nauseating use of Word or PDF resumes.  You just need to pick a resume template, customize the content, and print and share the results to your heart’s content.

The Follow feature for companies is also a great ego booster for employees.  Think of it as something like Twitter: the more followers you have, the more popular you are.  And if your connections know you’ve got a lot of followers, they’d see your company as something that matters or something that people care about.  So don’t hesitate to add this to your company page.  You might even get investors for your company when they see how popular it is.

In order to have many connections on Linkedin, always be ready for great opportunities like connecting with potential employers or business partners.  The thing with Linkedin is, when you signup, you get a primary network when you link your contacts from Facebook or your e-mail address to your Linkedin account.  With this primary network, you generate a secondary network – these are the people that your connections know.  The more Connections you have, the larger your secondary network will be.  This is an extensive subset of your core network, and can be leveraged in conjunction with all the other features highlighted today.

If you want to connect with a secondary connection, you might want to ask a mutual connection for an introduction instead of going straight to your target, as a built-in recommendation to the person you’d like to meet.   You just need to find your mutual connection and open the profile page, click “Get introduced through a connection” on the right side of the profile.  If only one person can make the introduction, the Request an Introduction page will appear; move your cursor over the arrow next to the Send InMail button and click Get introduced.  If more than one person can make the introduction, you may choose who you want to make the introduction.  Then enter a subject for your message, write your reason why you want to be introduced, then click the Send Request.