I’ve been surprisingly pleased with LinkedIn’s improvements over the last year or so. I was beginning to think the network was stagnating, but I’m optimistic once again that it’s a worthy of some time and maintenance.
I tell you what, though: they’ve got a great example of how to unnecessarily shoot yourself in the foot by frustrating your users and giving them poor excuses.
“Skills & Expertise” are case-sensitive. D’oh!
I love LinkedIn’s endorsement functionality, even if it is worthless—a potential client seeing endorsed skills in an area they’re considering hiring me for can’t hurt, at the very least. But it’s frustrating me to no end and it’s making LinkedIn look dumb. Here’s why:
I’m pretty active in the WordPress community, and most of my work involves it. Naturally, I’m getting some skill endorsements for it. Check out what happens when people endorse me for “WordPress” (correct casing) and “WordPress”.
Nice. This should show 9 endorsements for WordPress. What’s even worse is that the one with the most endorsements is incorrectly cased—and don’t think it’s not a big deal. There’s an actual function in WordPress core designed to handle it.
So, what does LinkedIn say, officially, about this issue?
I have duplicate skills on my profile. Can I merge them?
Unfortunately, skills cannot be merged. If you have duplicate skills on your profile, we suggest one of the two following options:
Delete the skill with the least amount of endorsements. Unfortunately, the endorsements will be deleted as well. They cannot be transferred over to the remaining skill at this time.
Keep both skills on your profile if you do not want to lose any endorsements.
What do you mean by “cannot”, LinkedIn? I think you mean “are not allowed to be”. I opened a support ticket and challenged them on this, and I got:
Unfortunately, at this time we do not have this functionality available to merge skill endorsements.
I try with all my might not to criticize other products’ development and capabilities. Building stuff is hard, really, really hard. But don’t tell me you can’t merge text-based data separated only by casing.
Anyway, I ignored it, because I don’t have time to care. And then this happened:
Ok, so let’s review my options if I want to add a new skill at this point:
- Delete 6 endorsements and contact all of them to try and get them to bother, once more, to endorse me, while trying to explain why a daggum capital P is so important to my professionalism.
- Delete 3 endorsements and contact all of them and sound even crazier.
- Delete 6 endorsements and just lose them.
- Delete 3 endorsements and still have the casing wrong.
Plus, I’ll just have to do any option again the next time someone endorses me with a a different casing. And repeat.
Please fix this, LinkedIn. Enough people are asking for it, other issues with skills notwithstanding.
Otherwise, my final option is to go back to not caring about LinkedIn anymore because it’s too frustrating to use.
The rest of us should learn from this sort of thing for our own businesses: don’t provide a feature that’s so difficult to use that it loses its own inherent value.