Just this morning I received a request from one of my contacts to write a recommendation for his profile. Although I had met and spoken with this gentleman a few times before I didn't quite know him well enough to write anything but I clicked on his profile out of curiosity all the same. Not very surprisingly he has a lot of recommendations which were likely solicited in a similar manner from his other contacts. What did shock me was the sheer number of them, though - over 1,400!

Now, the first problem with have four digits worth of recommendations is that his profile was a mile long and better than 90% of it was taken up by recommendations. Of his recommendations the vast majority were incredibly generic messages reading something to the effect of "Joe Blow is a great guy and I'm glad he's in my network." In all fairness there were some very legitimate write-ups on his page as well, but they were so few and far between it would take quite a long time to find enough recommendations of any substance to make reading them worthwhile.

From my understanding, the purpose of having recommendations on LinkedIn is to have something of a built-in reference system. Obviously nobody in his or her right mind would approve a recommendation that is slanderous, but the intent is still good. If this is the purpose, what good does it do to have literally hundreds of relatively meaningless one-liners written by people who hardly know you? In a word - zero.

In my opinion recommendations are one area in which quality should always be more important than quantity. No matter how many connections you have, or why you have them, recommendations should still be treated with a little more reverence, otherwise even the legitimate ones seem a bit tainted quite frankly.