Sooner or later someone you worked with asks whether you would write them a LinkedIn recommendation. Or the reverse happens: you ask a former manager for one, and she replies "Of course, just send me something I can use." Both situations put the same blank box in front of you, and most people fill it with adjectives.
A recommendation is a short public statement that sits on someone's profile with your name and job title attached. Whatever you write about them, a reader also learns something about you.
Say how you know them before anything else
The first thing a recruiter wants from a recommendation is not praise. It is the answer to "who is talking, and how would they know?" A paragraph of warm adjectives from an unclear source is worth very little. The same paragraph from the person who signed off on the work for three years is worth a lot.
So open with the relationship and its length, stated plainly: "I managed Priya for two years on the claims team at a mid-sized insurer."
When you write one, LinkedIn generally asks you to indicate the relationship and the role each of you held at the time, though the exact wording changes from version to version. Do not rely on that label alone. Readers skim the text, not the small print above it.
Your vantage point also decides what you can credibly say. A manager can speak to results, reliability and growth. A peer can speak to what it is like to share a deadline with this person. A report can speak to something nobody else can: how this person behaves when they have power over someone.
One situation, one result
After the relationship, give one specific situation and what came out of it. Not a career summary, not a list of traits. One scene.
The structure fits in five steps:
- How you know them, and for how long.
- A situation you saw first-hand: a project, a problem, a bad week.
- What they did, in a verb the reader can picture.
- What changed as a result. A number if you have one, a plain outcome if you do not.
- One closing sentence about the kind of role or team you would recommend them for.
Step four is where people panic, because they have no figure. You do not need one. "The client renewed" is a result. "I stopped checking her work" is a result too, and a surprisingly persuasive one.
A recommendation proves one thing well. It does not need to prove everything.
Why modest and concrete beats glowing and vague
Compare two sentences. "Daniel is an exceptional professional with outstanding leadership skills and a passion for excellence." And: "Daniel took over a project that was six weeks late and delivered it two weeks late, without losing anyone from the team."
The first could describe anybody, which means it describes nobody. The second is a smaller claim, and that is exactly why it lands: it is the kind of detail a person only writes if they were there.
Recruiters and hiring managers read recommendations the way they read references, looking for evidence rather than volume. Superlatives stacked on superlatives read as politeness, or as exaggeration. A limited, checkable claim reads as true, and one true thing makes the rest of the profile easier to believe.
Keep it short: three examples
Four to six sentences is plenty. Nobody expands a long recommendation to read the fourth paragraph, and a short one forces you to choose your best example instead of listing five weak ones. The people and employers below are invented.
For someone who reported to you:
"I managed Priya Raman for two years on the claims team at Northgate Mutual. When we moved to a new case system, she noticed that half our backlog came from one badly worded form, rewrote it with the legal team, and cut our open cases by about a third in a quarter. Nobody asked her to. I would hire her again for any role that needs someone to find the real cause of a problem."
For a peer:
"Tom Okafor and I worked side by side as analysts at Bellhaven Retail for eighteen months. During our busiest season a pricing error went live on a Friday evening. Tom stayed on the call until it was fixed, then wrote a two-line check that has caught the same error twice since. He is the colleague I want next to me on any project with a hard deadline."
For a former manager:
"I reported to Ingrid Solberg for three years at Castell Logistics. When a mistake of mine cost us a delivery slot with a key customer, she took the client call herself, then sat down with me to work out what had failed in the process rather than who to blame. I learned more that week than in any training course. Anyone joining her team will be managed fairly."
Notice what is missing: "passionate" and "goes above and beyond". Notice also what each one contains: a late project, an error, a mistake. Real work has those. Their presence is what makes the praise believable.
When they ask you to draft it yourself
This is common, and it is not dishonest in itself. Our guide on how to ask for a LinkedIn recommendation covers the request; what follows is the drafting part, done without putting words in someone's mouth.
- Write only facts they witnessed. The dates you worked together, the project, the outcome they saw. If they were not in the room, leave it out.
- Go easy on the adjectives. The judgement belongs to them. A draft that says "the best analyst I have ever managed" asks them to sign an opinion they never formed.
- Say explicitly that it is a starting point. Something like: "Here are the facts as I remember them. Please change anything that is not how you saw it, and cut what you would not say."
Then let go of it. If they rewrite the whole thing, good. If they shorten it to two sentences, those two sentences are theirs and worth more than your five. The line you must not cross is simple: every claim has to be one the signer would repeat, unprompted, if a recruiter phoned them. Preparing your references for a reference call is its own subject, but the test is the same.
The person being recommended normally reviews the text, chooses whether it appears on their profile, and can ask the writer for a revision. Nothing goes public by accident.
Saying no, and the trouble with swaps
Sometimes you are asked by someone whose work you barely saw, or saw and did not rate. You are allowed to decline. A recommendation you do not believe costs you credibility and does not help them much either, because half-hearted praise is easy to spot.
A short, kind refusal works: "I don't think I saw enough of your work on that project to write something useful. Someone who worked with you day to day would do you more justice." It is true, and it is not a verdict on them.
Reciprocity is the other trap. Two colleagues who post recommendations for each other on the same afternoon have produced something that looks exactly like what it is. Profiles generally show both the recommendations a person has received and the ones they have given, so the pattern is visible to anyone who looks. People who worked closely together often deserve each other's recommendations. Just do not trade them. Write yours because you mean it, and if they want to return the favour, months later is better than minutes later.
A recommendation is also only one part of a profile. Skill endorsements are its lighter cousin, and the rest of the LinkedIn profile checklist still applies. If you use a tool like Postulit to turn your profile into a CV, the facts in a good recommendation are often the same ones that belong in your experience bullets.
Before you send it
Read your draft and ask one question: could this text be pasted onto another person's profile without changing a word? If the answer is yes, it is not finished. Add the relationship, the dates, and the one thing you saw them do. Then cut it to five sentences and send it.