Hacker News Reader

Comment by leeny | Hacker News Reader

I don't think endorsements are meant to be true endorsements. If they were, LinkedIn would have written a weighted endorsement system by now (where an endorsement from someone with expertise in some field means more than, say, an endorsement from your realtor about your JavaScript skills).

It's just crowdsourced tagging with a different name. This way, recruiters who pay LinkedIn $10k/yr can more easily search profiles for keywords.

View on HN

I think this is absolutely right on. But a smart recruiter would realize that some measurable chunk of endorsements are selected by people who have no clue as to your skill set or level of ability in that particular area -- people who, for example, logged in, saw four possible endorsements they could give people in their network at the top of their screen, were feeling beneficent that day, and clicked on all of them. Or someone who you just endorsed for a skill, and they see that you did, and want to endorse you for something but already endorsed you for the 10 skills you preloaded, and so they just pick the first thing LinkedIn recommends.

Presumably LinkedIn has some algorithm by which they look at people with similar skill set groupings, and say ah, statistically most of the people with this set have these three additional skills, and then farm that out to your network to see who endorses it. New endorsements tweak the skill set, which feeds back into the algorithm. It's almost like a glorified, twisted game of The Game of Life.

"But a smart recruiter would realize that some measurable chunk of endorsements are selected by people who have no clue as to your skill set or level of ability in that particular area"

I don't use LinkedIn to do keyword searches really, but if you're into that sort of thing, I imagine that having tagged profiles is still much more useful than not having them.

Presumably, if you're a typical recruiter, you'll combine a keyword search with a list of schools or companies that your clients agree are a good proxy for aptitude.

Or you'll do a bit of manual pruning, blast some subset of the search results, and see what sticks.

a smart recruiter would realize...

Nobody said the smart recruiters are their target market.

Sounds like a narrow niche to me.

The issue there is that the value of those tags decreases if the majority just accept those tags suggested (which from what I've seen, most users do). There's no penalty to giving a tag, so if someone says "What to help one of your mates get a job by spending <1 second hitting a button" there's no reason not to (beyond your personal principles at least). To fix the system you either need to limit the number of endorsements you can give (e.g. you're allowed to give 3 endorsements (to anyone) for each contact you have), or have some way to force a comparison (e.g. is A or B a more competent Java developer in the context of Gaming?).

You just blew my mind. I had never considered that. Now that I think about it, this must be how endorsements are being used in the LinkedIn backend.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com