In my career I have always received great recommendation letters from management until now. I worked at a small international company in a high level tech position. The entire tech department was overseas while I worked in the US without a tech manager. My manager was on the business side. So I asked this manager and the CEO for a LinkedIn recommendation. The CEO gave me a good recommendation - which I expected based on positive feedback during my run at the company - but the manager's recommendation reads like he was drunk when he wrote it. Half of it is incoherent and it's very luke warm on selling my abilities. I was shocked since that's never happened before and the same manager prides himself in writing very persuasive letters to the company's customers and prospective customers.
So far I have simply chosen not to use the recommendation: LinkedIn lets you hide recommendations you don't approve. It's hidden currently.
I have not mentioned it to the manager. It seems it would be deeply embarrassing to him if he was drunk. Perhaps he intended to give a bad recommendation.
Should I discuss this with him or not?
I noticed this question after I posted. The answer that says the letter writer knows exactly what they did resonates with me. Could be that he didn't want to write a letter and intentionally sent an unusable one.
What would you do?
- I would delete the recommendation and get on with my life. – joeqwerty Sep 11 '20 at 18:56