Employers: The LinkedIn Recommendation is Not for You
Posted on July 14th, 2009 by Tim Eavenson | 2 Comments »Filed under: ., HR Issues |
As job searches by both seekers and HR departments have expanded online, the minefield of issues for employers has grown right along with it. The latest tip – coming in a story from the National Law Journal - is a good one both to make a point about protective management and also to show how easily the new social media can be misunderstood.
According to the article, employers have begun offering up reviews, kudos and other glowing praises of the work of their current and exiting employees on the social networking site LinkedIn. If you don’t know what LinkedIn is, think of it as what facebook does when it’s at work.1
Seriously, LinkedIn is a place for you to organize and present all of your professional information (an online resume, articles you’ve written, books you’re reading, blogs, etc), and then link your profile to everyone you know, either personally or professionally. It is a networking masterpiece, and when your employees use it correctly, it can be a beautiful, free new source of business.
Notice, though, that I said when your employees use it. LinkedIn is a place for people to connect. It is a public repository for the type of professional histories that used to be relegated to paper resumes. And for that reason, it has become arguably the #1 recruiting site on the web.2
Advice, 2.0
If you’ve spent any time around employment law, you probably see where this is going. Praising your employees on LinkedIn leaves a 21st-Century paper trail that can come back to haunt you if that employee ever sues for discrimination, wrongful termination, etc. From the Article:
Plaintiffs’ lawyers, [management-side attorneys] fear, are scouring these sites, looking for evidence to dispute firings, as most LinkedIn recommendations are positive. So if a supervisor claims that an employee was let go due to performance problems but gave a rave review about him or her on LinkedIn — that, the lawyers stress, won’t look so good.
This is just the Web 2.0 version of advice that management lawyers have been giving forever – be very careful about praising your exiting employees. I know it sounds harsh, but glowing praise (particularly where it is undeserved) can really be a problem. If an employment case goes to trial, you will be in the uncomfortable position of having to explain to a jury what happened in the hours or days between the writing the amazing recommendation and the time you canned the employee for poor performance.
And yet, something about hopping online and giving a departing employee a thumbs-up seems so much more innocuous than writing and signing a note on formal letterhead. You may even see it as a sort-of consolation prize – I can’t write you a letter, but I’ll say something nice about you on LinkedIn. That’s not reality. In fact, that “thumbs up” on LinkedIn is a million times more public than any letter of recommendation, and carries just as much (if note more) weight, given how many people are going to see it.
What’s an Employee to Do?
So is the recommendation feature on LinkedIn useless? No. In fact, it’s a fantastic tool for job searchers, and if you’re looking for a job you should be asking people for recommendations as much as possible. But we’re in new territory here, folks. Let’s think outside the box. If you can’t get recommendations from your former supervisors, who’s left?
EVERYBODY.
And not having your boss’s recommendation on your LinkedIn site actually frees you up to set yourself apart. Think about it: while letters of recommendation sort-of have to be from your former supervisor, anyone can recommend you on LinkedIn. Go back to your former places of employment (not your most recent – see below), and ask your coworkers, or someone from a different department that you worked on projects with, to recommend you. Ask colleagues at other businesses. Ask your old study partners from college. Feeling brave? Ask your spouse. Those kinds of recommendations can offer hiring managers insights into you that a letter from your former boss can’t touch.
One caveat – stay away from your most recent employer. Why? See part one of this post. If management there is getting the above advice from their employment lawyers (which they should be), asking your coworkers to recommend you puts them in a really bad spot with your former bosses, and nobody looking for recommendations from friends would want to see that happen.
Oh, and if you’d like to find me on LinkedIn, I’m right here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/timeavenson.
~~ Footnotes ~~
- If you don’t know what facebook is, you should probably log off your internet connection – someone might be calling you. |↩|
- The NLJ article notes a study that says 75% of hiring managers polled were using the site to recruit employees |↩|
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