| By Nora Fogarty |
It’s the hardest part of any LinkedIn profile: creating a profile summary that effectively communicates your skills and your professional goals, and captures the reader’s attention before they scroll down or click away. After all, LinkedIn isn’t like Facebook or Instagram; it’s a network created for professional development, and you want your content to reflect that. But at the same time, we all know that on the Internet, attention spans are short, and if your summary doesn’t scream engaging! or innovative! there’s a solid chance that prospective employers and connections will keep moving.
So how does one even write this kind of summary? What are the guidelines, and who decides on this stuff, anyway?
In my experience, it can be difficult to vocalize exactly what you want potential employers or recruiters to know about you. After all, for a college student, there isn’t always a clear path to a specific career, and if you are taking a full class load, chances are that you aren’t already working a standard 9-5 at the same time. Because of this, you want your profile to communicate skills and abilities you’ve honed in class or maybe in a part-time job, and organizing these into a cohesive, well-written paragraph can seem like the most daunting task in the world.
When you do sit down to get started, here’s a piece of advice that has served me well thus far: don’t start typing right away. Make an outline, or a list, and answer a few questions for yourself: What do I want to tell people about me? Who is my target audience? What general field do I want to attract professional interest in, and what are they looking for in an applicant? Once you’ve answered these, it will be much easier to decide what information to include, and you can start writing in earnest.
You can think of your Summary as comparable to “the first few paragraphs of your best-written cover letter” (LinkedIn offers a great tips and tricks section, for further reference!), meaning that you should be talking about specific things that make you, personally, unique and valuable. It’s also a great idea to phrase these qualities in the form of keywords or buzzwords, since LinkedIn as a platform relies heavily on these tags. Obviously, you shouldn’t just throw in words just because they sound good –- Marketing! Graphic Design! Strategic! Wait, what? –- but if a skill or piece of experience under your belt aligns with a frequently-used search term, don’t be shy about adding those in.
A few final notes:
- Don’t be afraid to start off with a powerful or high-energy opener. If you need to grab attention, your opening line is crucial. While there’s no need to come up with an elaborate one-liner, try to set the scene in a way that’s going to draw people in. What’s your proudest accomplishment? Can you introduce that in a way that requires reading past the first line?
- After the bulk of your Summary – by which I mean your outstanding opening paragraph – include a Specialties section. This can be just bullet points, but it streamlines the listing of your best qualities, and will both allow you to be searched via keywords and is easy for anyone looking at your page to read and internalize.
- There’s a 2,000 character word limit on the Summary for a reason! Don’t write a novel – zing in with that snappy opening line, elaborate about yourself, your skills, and your goals for a short paragraph, and then seal the deal with your Specialties. Smart and succinct is the way to go.
The LinkedIn Summary may seem intimidating at first, but it doesn’t have to be a source of agony and despair. There’s also an incredible amount of resources out there about this fantastic networking platform – Forbes.com, for one, offers an in-depth look at creating your new and improved summary. Of course, there’s always the Career Center as well! If you’re looking for advice or help, we offer LinkedIn Labs on a frequent basis – including tomorrow, Thursday, at 4:15pm in the Career Center! Keep an eye on the Facebook page for future dates and times, or stop by for a meeting with a counselor.