While good recommendations may not be everything to potential employers, good recommendations give your job application a human assurance. Potential employers are impressed and assured by good recommendations.
The Ladders says that recruiters consider these 3 recommendation-related things very important things about candidates they are interviewing:
1.There should be a strong relation between the number of connections and the number of recommendations on a LinkedIn profile. If a candidate has a large network of people on his LinkedIn profile but very few recommendations, this is hardly a good sign.
2. However, network and recommendations should not be exactly the same; it only looks planned. It also foreshadows that the recommendations will be weak and 'fluffy'.
3. Which brings us to three: recruiters are interested in recommendations of quality and substance, not weak, vague ones that don't sound credible.
So how to get excellent recommendations? Many of us have always written our own recommendations. After all, if you ask a professor or a former employer to just sign a letter, it makes for a much quicker process. However, while this technique may have worked when you just needed 3 recommendations, it likely won't work when you have 20 to write!
Here is how to get a great recommendation letter, how to get it quick and how to make sure it looks fresh:
Remind your network that it will not take them too much time to write you a recommendation, maybe just 10 minutes. Tell them three short paragraphs is more than enough.
Give them the written version of talking points. Ask them to mention the project you worked on together, the clients you signed up, and the qualities in you that they might have noticed (and you want mentioned to future employers), like your work ethic and teamwork.
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