How to Request a LinkedIn Recommendation

By Joel Elad from LinkedIn For Dummies, 2nd Edition

4 of 7 in Series: The Essentials of LinkedIn Recommendations

In an ideal world, you’d never request a Recommendation from your LinkedIn Network members and colleagues. Everyone who’s had a positive experience working with you would just automatically post a raving Recommendation on LinkedIn. But the reality is that most likely only your raving fans and very heavy LinkedIn users are going to make unsolicited Recommendations. Your mildly happy customers, former bosses whose jokes you laughed at consistently, and co-workers who you haven’t seen in five years could all stand a little prompting.

When you identify the person (or people) you want to write you Recommendations, you’re ready to create a Recommendation request. To get started on authoring your request, follow these steps:

Enlarge 1 Roll your mouse over the Profile link from the top navigation bar and then choose Recommendations from the menu that appears. There’s really no such thing as too many Recommendations as long as the quality is good.	Enlarge 2 Click the Request Recommendations tab, then click the drop-down box arrow) to choose what you want to be recommended for from the list provided. LinkedIn will tie this recommendation to a particular position or school attended from your profile, so you need to select the position (or school you were attending) where the recommender observed you and is providing their recommendation.	Enlarge 3 Under the Decide Who You’ll Ask header, type the name of the person you want to request a Recommendation from into the Your Connections text field. You can add the names of up to 200 people in this text field, and all will get a Recommendation request. If you click the little blue In icon to the right of the text box, LinkedIn will open up a new window containing the list of your connections, which you can select by checking the checkbox next to someone’s name in the window. As you start typing the name of the person, you should see that name pop up. Clicking the name adds it to the list of names visible in the Your Connections field. You can now type in another name if you would like to send this Recommendation request to more than one person.
Enlarge 4 Type your message in the field provided. The same etiquette is recommended here as in other requests: Don’t just accept the boilerplate text that LinkedIn fills in, but rather customize it to create a personal note.	Enlarge 5 Check your spelling and grammar and click Send. You can write your message first using a program like Microsoft Word, run the Spelling & Grammar check, then cut and paste your message into the space provided, if you like.