If you thought some of the "job skills" touted on LinkedIn were a little ridiculous, some have decided to lean in to the joke even harder.
In 2012, business networking site LinkedIn added a feature that allowed members to endorse various skills on a friend's or colleague's profile. The site says it's a way for users to further pump up their job prospects past the basic résumé. But some are now making a sport out of endorsing their colleagues and friends for abstract and silly "skills."
You might be good at "Adobe Photoshop," "restructuring" and " teamwork" — but how good is your "butter" and "hugs" mojo?
The trick is that you can only add a skill that the site has in its database. For example, start typing the letters "ver" and auto-completed suggestions for "functional verification" and "works very well with others" appear. So the game becomes finding the most humorous ones the job site will let you add.
While putting outright jokes on a professional employment page might seem like it would hurt your job search, some recruiters say it can highlight the applicant's humor and smarts. For years people have tried creative ways of standing out, from the "candy bar résumé" with individual skills listed as ingredients, to mocking up an entire fake Amazon page with themselves as the product.
But the latest version seems a little more about making a meta-commentary on the whole job seeking act itself.
“That’s the interesting thing about millennials in the workforce,” Matt Nicolaou, a 26-year-old account manager at a talent management software company told the Wall Street Journal. He said he's endorsed his colleagues for "Microsoft Office," and has endorsed his brother for "YouTube" and "cheese" skills.
“They want to work hard but they want to laugh at the ridiculousness of a system that allows them to professionally endorse people for things like sword fighting or birthday cakes,” he said.
