A lot of people don’t know – also don’t care and don’t try ever – that LinkedIn endorsements can’t be deleted. Of course, you can delete your listed skills and you can disable the endorsements that you received, but they won’t get deleted completely.
What is it good for?
Well, let’s say you go to a conference where you do a lot of networking and you expect to receive a lot of visitors at your LinkedIn profile and also a lot of endorsements. But you don’t want your current skills to receive more endorsements, you want other new skills to get endorsed.
In this case, the easiest way to “force” what skills get endorsed is to put them to the top of your skill list, because people are usually lazy to open the rest of your skills and scroll down to endorse them. But if it’s not enough, here comes the real magic:
Delete your skills.
As I just told you, your endorsements won’t get deleted, so you can delete any skills with the endorsements, when you add the skill later to your profile all of the previous endorsements will re-appear instantly when you add the skill. Let’s go back to the conference scenario: Since you don’t have any other skills to endorse but only those that you want people to endorse, they will endorse those… since they have no other options.
Important: To you get your endorsements back, you need to add the same skill. If you delete: “SEO” later add “SEO” again, and not “Search Engine Optimization” because that is a different skill which didn’t have endorsements. The best practice is to make a note what was the exact name of the listed skills that you deleted.
When you received the fresh crispy LinkedIn endorsements to your newly listed skills, you can just add the old skills with the exact same name and puff! Magic just happened: You have all your old skills with the old endorsements and the new skills with the new endorsements.
