LinkedIn Recommendations Before You Leave: Who to Ask

Here's the short answer: ask for LinkedIn recommendations during your last week at the job, while you are still fresh in everyone's mind. Send a short, personalized message to five to eight people you trust, name one specific project you worked on together, and offer to draft three bullet points so their reply is easy to write. Ten minutes per ask, done.

Most people leave a job with zero new LinkedIn recommendations. Not because nobody would have written one. Because the request never went out. The last two weeks fill up with handover meetings, exit interview prep, the final farewell email, and somewhere in the noise the small five-minute task of typing out a request quietly slides off the list.

That is a small career fumble. Recommendations from people you worked with directly are the closest thing to a permanent reference your profile will ever have. Six months from now, a recruiter scanning your page will not call your old manager. They will read the three paragraphs your team lead wrote, and decide in twenty seconds whether to message you.

When to ask: the last week, not the day after you leave

Ask in your final week at the company. Three reasons it works better than any other window:

• You are top of mind. People are already thinking about your departure, so a recommendation request lands as part of the same moment, not an out-of-the-blue ping.
• You still have access. You can pull up a project doc and quote a result back to them, which makes their reply faster to write.
• You are still a coworker. Once you are an ex-employee asking a former colleague, the dynamic shifts. The ask sits in their inbox longer.

If you missed the window, ask in your first week after leaving. After that, every additional week lowers the response rate. After three months, you are asking someone to dust off a memory and write to it, which is a different kind of favor.

Who to ask: aim for five to eight, not twenty

Six is the right number to plan for. Five is fine if you have a small team. Eight is the upper end where the asks still feel personal rather than blast.

Spread them across three categories so your profile reads as fully formed instead of one note:

• One or two managers. Your direct manager, ideally. If they are also leaving, a former manager from earlier in your tenure works.
• Two or three peers. Teammates who saw your day-to-day work. Aim for one technical peer and one cross-functional peer if you can.
• One or two clients, partners, or stakeholders. Someone outside your immediate team who depended on your work. This is the recommendation that future hiring managers find the most credible.

And one more, optional: someone you mentored, or someone who reported to you. A recommendation written from below carries a different signal than one written from above, and most profiles do not have one.

The list of who you should ask almost always overlaps with the list of who you should personally thank before your last day. If your memory is about to skip names, this is the moment to check your calendar against your shortlist. Our piece on the eight categories of people to thank before you leave a job walks the same map from a different angle.

What to say: a copy-ready request

The biggest mistake people make is sending the LinkedIn default template, which reads as a templated bulk request and quietly gets ignored. The fix is two sentences of context up top and a small amount of work taken off the recipient's plate.

Here is a clean version you can adapt:

Hi [Name],

Friday is my last day at [Company], and before things wind down I wanted to ask if you would be willing to write a short LinkedIn recommendation for me. Working with you on [specific project or responsibility] has been one of the parts of this job I will miss most.

To make it easy, here are three things I would love for you to touch on, only if they match what you saw:

• A specific outcome we produced together (for example, the launch result, the doc that got reused, the call that landed).
• A way of working you noticed (for example, calm under pressure, clear in writing, the one who closed the loop).
• A strength you have mentioned to me before.

Two or three sentences is more than enough. And if you would rather not, no pressure at all, I know the next two weeks are busy.

Thank you for everything.
[Your name]

This template works because it does the three things most requests skip. It anchors the ask in a specific shared project, so the writer has somewhere to start. It pre-suggests bullets, so they are editing a draft instead of writing a blank page. And it explicitly releases them from saying yes, which paradoxically makes them more likely to.

The harder question: which six people?

Before you copy that template into ten messages, the obvious question is the hard one. Most people answer "the obvious names" and then realize, two weeks after leaving, that they forgot the project lead from last quarter, the cross-functional partner who unblocked their biggest launch, and the senior stakeholder who quietly championed them in rooms they were not in. The recommendations that would have shifted their next job search the most are the ones they never asked for.

Your calendar is the cleanest record of who you actually worked with. Every recurring meeting, every one-off pairing session, every working group. The list is already there, you just have not looked at it as a list.

That is what It Was Great Working With You does. Upload an export of your work calendar and it returns a ranked list of the people who showed up in your week most often, including the ones your memory will skip. Spend three minutes there before you write the first request and the rest of this work gets noticeably easier.

Edge cases worth handling

Rocky relationship with your manager. Skip them. A lukewarm recommendation from a direct manager is worse than no recommendation from them at all, because it reads to recruiters as a tell. Ask a manager from earlier in your career instead, or weight the peer and stakeholder recommendations more heavily.

You were laid off. Ask early, within the first week or two of the layoff, not after the job search drags on. Frame the ask as helpful to your search and easy to write. Most former managers want to help; you are giving them a concrete way.

You are leaving a remote job and barely know your team in person. Stay specific. "We worked together on the Q2 onboarding redesign" is more credible than "we worked together for two years." If the person needs jogging, send a screenshot of the project doc with your ask. Our piece on leaving a remote job covers more of what makes the remote departure feel different.

The person says yes but never writes it. A nudge after one week is fine. After two weeks, drop it. The polite no is the unanswered ask, and pushing past it costs the relationship more than the recommendation is worth.

You also want a reference letter. The LinkedIn recommendation is public and short. A reference letter is a separate document and a separate ask. Do not combine them. Our walkthrough on asking your boss for a reference before you leave covers that conversation, including the script for the verbal ask first.

One last quiet tip: offer to return one

Inside the request, offer to write a recommendation for them too. Half will take you up on it, and you will end the week with three or four recommendations going out to your profile from people you actually rate. This is the part of LinkedIn that compounds. Recommendations exchanged at the end of a stretch of good work tend to sit there for years, doing slow, quiet referrals on your behalf.

Five to eight asks, sent in your last week, with one specific project mentioned and three bullets pre-drafted. Spend two minutes with It Was Great Working With You first to make sure the right names are on the list, and the whole thing takes an evening.

If you are still in the planning phase, you might also like the people you'll forget to say goodbye to when you leave your job.