Last week I visited my moribund profile on LinkedIn to find at the top of the page a message that said: “Your connections Dominic, Louise and Clive have endorsed you for new skills and expertise.”

The three of them evidently think I’m pretty talented, which is nice to know. Variously they attest to my possessing seven skills: newspaper; magazines; journalism; copy editing; business journalism; editorial and newspapers.

This would be flattering were it not for two things. The first is that I’ve never heard of any of them, let alone worked with them. The second is that half the things they cite aren’t skills. Newspaper – either in the singular or plural – most certainly is not a skill: it is a dying product. Copy editing is a skill but, alas, it is one I don’t have.

Of all the things about LinkedIn I do not understand, this craze of “endorsing” one another’s “skills” is the most baffling.

It’s not just Dominic, Louise and Clive who are indiscriminately pressing the endorse button. Since the feature was introduced last September, an orgy of endorsing has been going on. By December, 550 million endorsements had been made and, as of the end of July, the number had reached two billion. Every week 50 million are being handed out.

Value of rating
In theory, it could be jolly useful to have a way of rating colleagues for their skills. It would mean being able to see at a glance how good people were at certain things – making us all better at getting the right person into the right job.

In practice, it means nothing of the sort: it is moronic, irritating and serves no purpose at all – apart from proving beyond a doubt that the tens of millions of endorsers on LinkedIn possess two skills in particular: brown-nosing and time-wasting.

Yet the system is being taken worryingly seriously. According to LinkedIn, your profile is four times as likely to be viewed when your skills have been endorsed.

There are some obvious things wrong with this. For a start, half the people doing the endorsing don’t have the first idea if you have the skills or not. Or they are your mother-in-law. Or they only want to endorse you if you endorse them back.

The next drawback is that there is only room for endorsing and none for doing the opposite. There is no “denounce” button on LinkedIn. You can remove an endorsement you have already given, but that is as far as it goes.

An acquaintance tells me that a colleague was recently fired for utter incompetence and laziness. But his profile showed a string of endorsements from friends and camp followers, and no possibility of disagreeing with any of them.

Worse, the string of tiresome notifications saying that “so-and-so has added a new skill” is not balanced by messages saying that so-and-so has just subtracted one. I ought to be able to tell my contacts that the skill I used to have in mental maths is now sadly atrophied and that my previously workable French is now almost non-existent. LinkedIn seems to have no interest in such things.

Then there are the skills themselves. It is not just Dominic, Louise and Clive who are unskilled at spotting what a skill is. I see that 66 people have endorsed Jeff Weiner, the website's chief executive, for having a skill called "LinkedIn". Which makes no sense at all.

Girl Guide model
There is the further difficulty that even with more bona fide skills, such as "team leadership", it is not clear what it means to have them. LinkedIn could learn something from the Girl Guides, which for the past 100 years has operated an excellent system whereby you only get the badge if you can prove you have mastered the skill.

For example, “team leader” – which is now a Guide badge, along with cooking and first aid – involves following a rigorous seven-step process of theory and practice. There is no room for skill inflation or for sucking up.

By contrast, on LinkedIn both are rampant. Two of the most endorsed skills are “strategic planner” and “public speaker” – skills that in real life are possessed by hardly anyone. In my whole life I’ve only come across a couple of dozen executives who are really good at either; telling people that they are good when they are not is not just dishonest, it’s dangerous. It could lead to foolish strategic decisions and it encourages the giving of too many tedious speeches.

Yet the biggest failing of all in the endorsement system is that it turns out to be only for the little people. Barack Obama, Sir Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington and Angela Ahrendts have shut down this feature on their LinkedIn profiles.

They are too grand to have any skills at all. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013)