LinkedIn is, without a doubt, one of the most used job search platforms around. With more than 700M job seekers and employees, LinkedIn is the perfect platform to meet with your future career or employer. And to find a good job on LinkedIn, employees have to impress the employers with good summaries. But do you actually know how to write a good LinkedIn summary?
To find more job opportunities, job seekers have to create a better profile. They should upload a photo in which they look professional, state their job experiences, add skills to show what they are capable of, and, most important of all, they must write a summary. The summary is the first thing the recruiters look at, and, generally, they decide to keep on exploring the rest of the profile or not after a short gaze at the summary.
You may ask why? There might be something deeply valuable for the company in this person’s profile who didn’t write a good LinkedIn summary. Well, this is possible. But, the human mind doesn’t work like this most of the time. If we can’t find something extraordinary, wise, cheerful, fun, or even irritating in the things we look at first sight, we tend to lose our focus and skip to something else. This very human fact doesn’t change when recruiters examine the profiles of job seekers.
Also, the ability to express oneself in short words is extremely valuable in the age of Twitter. This shows that the individual knows themselves and can display it to others in a short period of time. Due to its importance in business life, the recruiters value this ability more than we might imagine.
As we have seen, it is crucial to write better LinkedIn summaries for job seekers to make their profile stand out. If you are one of them and want to find more job opportunities, attract the attention of big companies, work in the job of your dreams, here is a basic guide and list of some tips to improve the quality of your LinkedIn summaries.
Step-By-Step Guide to Write a Good LinkedIn Summary
Here’s the step-by-step guide for writing a good LinkedIn summary.
Tell About Yourself
First things first, you should state who you are. Avoid long explanations and focus on your special characteristics. What is the occupation(s) that defines you? What’s your best ability which you may offer as a service to clients? What makes you “you” as a person? Your answer(s) to these questions must come at the beginning of your summary.
It is not too different from what we mention first when we meet someone new. We first say our name, and then, we ask, “Okay, what do you do for a living?”. This is also what employers want to know about you. So, give them a short but captivating answer!
Tell Your Purpose
Okay, the employer knows who you are now. In the second step, you should get into details a little bit. Explain how your abilities can be beneficial for the companies. Talk about your expectations, your goals for the future. Or, what you’ve done, achieved in the past(namely your work experience).
This stage is extremely important because here, the employers see why they should hire you. Your abilities can be found in millions of people. What truly separates you from them is “how” you use your abilities. But again, be careful. You should keep it simple and clean. No one has time to read a summary longer than 5 to 10 lines.
Hit Hard
Now, the employer knows who you are, what is the “use” of your abilities. To end your summary, you must find a powerful sentence to conclude what you have just mentioned. It can be the “summary” of your summary, a sentence that describes your abilities best, or even a joke you like telling your friends. You are free to pick according to your style or the work opportunities you are looking for. What is important here is to use a sentence that is hard to forget and appealing.
Tips About Writing a Good LinkedIn Summary
Below you can find some good tips about writing a good summary:
Choose Your Target
Every text is written for special purposes and an audience. You can’t write a Kafkaesque novel and address it to children. Or, a “5 ways to boost your sex life” like article’s intention isn’t generally being published in an academic journal. As the writer of your summary, you should choose your target group(s). This will determine the style you should use to catch the interest of your readers.
Use First Person Pronoun
For some, the summary section is where they can copy-paste their biography. This is a huge mistake. You should not be caught in this trap. You should express yourself as who you are. To do this, you should use the “I” language.
Emphasize Your Hard Skills
Soft skills enable you to pass a great interview and get the job you have applied for. But, you are not at this point yet. Even though they are important for a successful interview, it is preferable not to talk about them in your summary. They are abilities that you have to demonstrate in face-to-face situations, rather than mentioning them like “I’m self-confident, dynamic and, hard-working” in your summary.
You should focus on your hard skills. You should emphasize “facts” to your future employers. They can’t be sure if you are self-confident or not before interviewing you, but they may have a better idea of you knowing your work experience and “tangible” abilities.
Utilize Numbers
We love statistics. They are easy to understand and easy to measure. We can count on them. Therefore, using simple stats about your earlier work experiences or emphasizing your language level with numbers like “B2” or “C1” would enhance your summary outlook.
Include Some Keywords
Employers generally search for words about the kind of employees they look for. If you want to be more visible in their searches, you should find the keywords that might catch their interests. Find at least five keywords and, then, use them in your summary.
Show Your Personality
As mentioned above, employers usually look for your skills(soft skills), experience, and language use. But, if you add one or two unrelated skills to your job in your summary, this shows that you have something unique and authentic. Having skills, hobbies, or occupations outside of your work field creates a better image of you in the eyes of employers.
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Also, you may make use of humor! Job settings are usually boring, unpleasant, and grey-toned environments. If you make who reads your summary laugh, even for a second, this will make their day more beautiful, and they will remember it easily. No one expects you to write a summary like Ricky Gervais or Louis C.K. would have done. This would be inappropriate. But, mentioning one or two jokes would be a great idea.
Call To Action
People tend to do something when we specifically tell them to do it. So, you might say, at the end of your summary, “If you think I would be a potential employee, write to me!”. But, be sure that this kind of sentence would suit the style of your summary.
To Conclude Writing a Good LinkedIn Summary
In this article, we discussed ways to improve our LinkedIn summaries. It’s important to keep in mind that these are just pieces of advice and not norms or principals. You may use different techniques or even develop new ones. This is totally up to you. The most important thing here is finding your needs and how you want to express your message.
I hope what you have just read was beneficial for you, and I also hope that you will find the job of your dreams as soon as possible. Now, open your laptop, and start writing your summary!
1 Comment
I thought I knew how to write a good LinkedIn summary, but apparently I did not apply any of these methods. I will be keeping it brief and precise from now on.