The key to an effective LinkedIn summary is crafting a profile that highlights your skills, experiences, and goals in a way that appeals to potential employers or clients. Your summary should serve as an elevator pitch to convey why you are the ideal candidate in a concise yet compelling manner. Follow these tips to write a stellar LinkedIn summary that gets you noticed.
Understand the purpose of your LinkedIn summary
Your LinkedIn summary exists for one purpose only – to encourage the viewer to continue reading your full profile or get in touch. It is essentially a sales pitch summarizing why you would be an asset to an organization or contact. Keep the focus on highlighting impressive career accomplishments and skills of interest to potential employers rather than giving a general overview of your work history. Your goal is to intrigue the reader enough to want to learn more.
Know your target audience
The most important thing to keep in mind when crafting your summary is your target audience. Your goal is to appeal to hiring managers, recruiters, or prospective clients browsing LinkedIn profiles, so your content should be tailored to what they want to see. Research roles or opportunities you are pursuing and emphasize skills, experience, and certifications most valued for those positions. Using relevant industry keywords can help your profile appear in more searches.
Lead with a branding statement
Your first sentence should serve as a branded tagline encapsulating who you are and the value you provide. Include your current job title and overview of your top skills and strengths. You may also mention number of years of experience in your industry. This “elevator pitch” introduction will provide viewers with an immediate sense of how you can contribute to an organization.
Emphasize relevant skills and accomplishments
The body of your summary should highlight impressive skills, achievements, and qualifications relevant to the types of roles you are targeting. Include keywords and phrases from the job descriptions you are applying for so recruiters can instantly see you have the required experience and skills. Quantify your accomplishments with metrics and data when possible. For example, mention key projects delivered, savings generated, sales closed, costs reduced, productivity improved, etc. This provides tangible evidence of the value you delivered.
Customize for each opportunity
A best practice is to slightly tailor your LinkedIn summary each time you apply for a new position. Tweak the focus and keywords to align with that particular job’s requirements and show how your background maps to their needs. Having a customizable summary ready to go will allow you to submit profiles quickly that feel targeted. Keep the overall structure consistent but swap out a few key details to customize.
Communicate career progression
Your summary should quickly communicate career progression and growth over time. Highlight how your responsibilities, competencies, and impact expanded with each opportunity. Use action verbs to help summarize key experiences and steer clear of simply listing job titles and duties. Demonstrating how you have taken on leadership roles, cultivated new skills, and driven results over the course of your career tells a compelling story.
Showcase soft skills
While hard skills and technical qualifications are crucial, soft skills are equally important for standing out. Sprinkling in high-demand soft skills such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking, project management, and attention to detail can give you an edge. However, avoid generic labels and instead demonstrate these attributes through specific examples. For instance, mention presentations delivered, teams led, or processes improved to exhibit key skills.
Add multimedia
Including relevant images, videos, SlideShare presentations, or other media in your profile can help bring it to life while showcasing additional skills. For example, designers, photographers, and other creatives can include samples of work. Others can link to videos of presentations given or projects completed. Just be sure the multimedia elements you select provide value and align with the rest of your personal brand.
Spotlight education
Briefly summarize your educational credentials if they are pertinent to the opportunities you are pursuing. Listing your degree, university, major, minor, graduation year, special honors, and relevant coursework can validate your qualifications. You can also include certifications, trainings, conferences attended, publications, volunteer work, languages spoken, and other details that provide insight into your background.
Express your professional personality
While maintaining a formal tone, you can infuse your summary with a bit of your personal style to humanize the profile. For example, mentioning you are passionate about continuous learning, driven by challenge, or excel in fast-paced environments can give viewers a sense of your work style. Just keep it professional and focused on attributes relevant to the job.
Tell your career story
Craft an interesting narrative that connects the dots between your past experiences and future aspirations. Explain how your career has progressed over time and led you to your current goals. Making these connections explicit allows the reader to see your journey and understand how you arrived where you are. Mentioning future ambitions also conveys drive and direction.
Balance breadth and depth
Aim for a balance of breadth of abilities and depth of expertise when summarizing your background. You want to present yourself as a well-rounded, versatile candidate while still highlighting specialized skills and accomplishments. Including both elements demonstrates you can apply your deep expertise across a range of responsibilities and situations.
Be authentic and distinctive
While resumes follow a standard format, a LinkedIn profile allows you to get creative and develop a personal brand. Share details that capture your individuality, interests, and passions beyond work to come across as a real, multifaceted person. You can mention personal facts or experiences that shaped your development to create a genuine, memorable profile.
Proofread extensively
Typos, grammatical errors, and clumsy phrasing in your summary can undermine your professionalism and attention to detail. Review every sentence closely and aim for smooth, succinct language that is free of mistakes. Ask others to proof your summary as a second set of eyes will likely catch things you missed. A flawless profile conveys polish.
Refresh regularly
As you gain new skills, accomplishments, and responsibilities in your career, remember to keep your LinkedIn summary updated. Set reminders every few months to tweak your summary to reflect your latest experiences, capabilities, and objectives. This ensures your profile always represents your current self at that point in your professional journey.
Use LinkedIn resources
Take advantage of LinkedIn’s learning resources, tips, and tools to optimize your profile. LinkedIn provides specialized guidance for students, veterans, volunteers, freelancers, career changers, and other groups. Look for their recommendations on keywords, formatting, length, style pointers, and more tailored to your specific needs.
Following these best practices can help you craft an engaging, compelling LinkedIn summary that makes a strong first impression on potential connections. Keep the focus on showcasing the skills, experiences, and attributes that would appeal to your target employers. With a stellar summary, you can leverage LinkedIn to take your career to the next level.