Rory Cullen, Kaizen Software Developer

If you are like me, you use Gmail contacts as your “master” database for contact information.  I not only have email, address, and phone information on friends and family, but also work-related contacts, Frequent flyer numbers, and lots of contacts who I rarely need to contact.  When I got my new Droid, I was psyched about how Gmail would automatically sync contacts with my phone.  Then I was bummed to see that all these unnecessary contacts were added as well.  When I need to make a call, I don’t want to scroll through all that junk to find the one person I need.

Here’s the easy way to limit which contacts get to your phone:

Organize your Gmail contacts into at least two Groups.

1. My Contacts: this is the Gmail default address book.  This is where you want to store anyone you want to sync to your phone.
2. Other Contacts (name it what you want): These are the other contacts that you don’t want on your phone.  For me, it’s mostly contacts from past employment, membership numbers like frequent flyer numbers, and people I haven’t contacted for years.

In my case, I named it “Info, Not for phone”.  Stupid, but exactly what it is.

To adjust Groups in Contacts, select all of the Contacts you want to keep off your phone, go to “Groups” button, and select “Add to New Group”, or add to an existing group if you prefer.  Next, with the same contacts selected, go to Groups and select “Remove from My Contacts”.

Your Droid will sync automatically and you’ll find you have a much cleaner contact list on your phone.

Over the past month, I have received two endorsement requests from connections in LinkedIn. One from a high school classmate I have not seen in over 15 years, and another from a friend who I know from non-work activities. My question is, why do they think I can endorse them? Is this their fault, or my fault? My fault for accepting them as connections in the first place, or their fault for thinking a recommendation from me is what is going to make their profile stronger?

The first I ignored completely. I have not seen the guy for years, and have no idea if he is a good employee. I think he was student body president at some point, but can I judge his performance accurately after all these years? He had, and has, great hair. Ok, good hair. All hair is good hair at my age. I did not bother letting him know why I could not endorse him, I actually figured he sent requests to every connection, hoping to bulk his profile, so I did not consider this something we needed to discuss.

The second, as is usually the case, is more complicated. This is someone I see about four times a year, so I can’t really just ignore. Thankfully, I also feel really comfortable telling him I can’t endorse him based on our lack of a professional relationship. I’m ok with that, and I suspect he will be as well. Thankfully, neither is a former co-worker who just does bad work. Those are the awkward conversations that we all need to brave enough to have, but you’re on your own there!

As an employer, would you rather read through three awesome recommendations, or see a person has 20+ recommendations and assume they are great? I guess, based on feedback on how long HR spends on résumés (10-20 seconds), maybe the numbers game is the best bet. However, what if the HR person decides to look at those recommendations? Of course, they will never read them all, but they might see a few. Maybe they only see the generic ones from your high school buddies, and they don’t see the one from the VP of your company that details how you saved the company $500,000? Probably not what you were shooting for when bulking your profile.

If you ever meet with a career counselor, they will advise you to remove anything from your résumé that does not say something important about you. Something that adds value. I think we should approach recommendations with this in mind. Average is not worth it.

Thoughts? Do you believe in quality over quantity?

Bonus Tip: If someone writes you a disappointing recommendation, ask them to fix it. If you are not comfortable with that, then just use settings to make it invisible in your LinkedIn profile.

Note: Between drafting and publishing this post, I heard from one of the guys who contacted me for a recommendation. It turns out he is being laid off this month. I still can’t write that recommendation, but I can see why he might be seeking the extra boost to his profile, and will try to help in other ways.