I have been working on developing my career and as part of that I am wanting to build up a strong portfolio of recomendations from people that I am working with. I am using LinkedIn and have started my own blog (on my career interest). I am seeking recommendations from people I work by simply asking them to pass on their postive feedback to my manager when they tell me how happy they have been with my work. However, I am not sure that they are taking the time to do that.
Is there any suggestions that you / your readers could make to assist me in collecting feedback in a non-pretentious way? I certainly take the time to offer the best of my skills and work hard to ensure my consistency in dealing with others and my work ethic. I would like to build that into a good reputation within the business as the "go-to" person for my career interest and I am not sure how to go about this.
This is actually a question that we talked about in last week's episode of HR Happy Hour, so if you're in the mood to listen rather than read, you can hear it discussed there (around 23:45).
My advice is this: If you're seeking to build up your reputation, it's not really about compiling Linked In recommendations and emails to your boss (although emails to your boss are nice, and more people should send them).
Building up your reputation is, at its core, about being fantastic at what you do. The very best thing you can do is to be absolutely awesome at what you do, and get as many people as possible exposed to it. Volunteer your skills to nonprofits that need them. Blog (as you're doing) and leave comments on other people's blogs in your field. Become known in your industry's corner of the blogosphere. Become active in your field's professional associations. If you do all those things, you'll find that your reputation starts to build, and suddenly people will know you. That's going to be a lot more effective in making you a go-to person than just accumulating Linked In recommendations.
That said, a more effective way to get Linked In recommendations, rather than sending a generic request for someone to write one, is to be very specific about what you'd like them to write about -- such as "I was hoping you could write about my work on the ABC project." People sometimes have trouble thinking of what to write, and a specific suggestion like this can help.
But don't make those the cornerstone of your strategy.
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