LinkedIn Purity

A brief explanation of what I term 'LinkedIn Purity'

Contacts/Connections

To me, this is the second most important thing on LinkedIn, with your experience being number one.

With regards to your contacts, the purest form of a LinkedIn profile is one in which you know every single contact intimately, having worked with them enough to meet up for beers or go to their house for a BBQ.

The reality for most of us I suspect is we have several types of contacts that don't fall into this category, but are one or a mix of the following:

Vendors
Ex or current cow-orkers we can't stand (keep your enemies closer.)
Recruiters
Profile boosters(these are people who impress others that you know them, and to someone you are one too.)

Profile

Experience

How honest you are here decides your purity.  Everyone writes the resume to put your accomplishments in the best possible light to remain competitive.  So how much is fluff and how much is just sheer fabrication is almost impossible to determine for certain things.  For instance, I could say I was instrumental in implementing XYZ project at ABC company, but how do you confirm this?  It's one of those grey areas for most smaller companies/projects.  I mean it would probably be fairly easy to figure out if you really were the inventor of the iPhone.

Recommendations

All your recommendations have been written out of shear altruism and have never been solicited.  They have not been written out of guilt or perceived obligation.  They are all worthy of printing out on gold leaf adorned heavy stock paper and framed.  This is true of both those you have written and those that have been written about you.

The reality is, sometimes people solicit and we comply.  Sometimes we throw people a bone for various reasons.  And we will also approve a recommendation even though it appears that it was written by a 12 year old on NyQuil.


Skills & Expertise Endorsements

These are similar if lesser in impact than a recommendation.  And it is infinitely easier to endorse someone with a click than it is to write a paragraph long recommendation.  The purity comes from refraining from endorsing those you either don't fully believe they hold/master a skill or accepting a skill endorsement from someone you either don't know well enough, or wasn't working with you by time you acquired the skill.  See my post on endorsements for more details.

Groups and Associations

How many groups can one be associated with?  I am guessing it is only a few, not dozens as I have seen on some profiles. Update: So I just read up on some LinkedIn tips and it seems that groups provide people with a loophole to contact someone. If you and they share a group, you don't need to be a 1st degree connection to contact them. I have seen mostly recruiters and consultant types with the long lists of groups, so now this makes perfect sense. So in the context of purity, less is more.