A LinkedIn summary might be the most essential part of your profile. It is your first impression given to the recruiter. The rest of your profile is full of titles and dates, and a recruiter will only look at it to confirm if you’re qualified for a job. But your summary tells them if you’ll be a good fit for them, which is much more important than meeting qualifications. You can use your summary to show off achievements, your ideals, and your personality.
Here you are going to learn few important things about your LinkedIn summary which you can keep in mind. Go through these points and create a wonderful and exciting LinkedIn summary.
1. Start with power words
You need to start very strong to immediately grab the reader’s attention. By default, LinkedIn shows only the first three lines, amounting to about 300 characters, in your summary before the reader has to click more. So make sure those characters have a solid impact, making them want to read more.
Also make sure you mention your goals and ambitions, what motivates you to move forward and what you are passionate about in your job or industry. Aside from that, make sure you combine all your greatest achievements into one highlight, making it easier for the recruiter to see and understand all that you’ve done.
2. Put up all your skills and achievements
A LinkedIn summary is not only an opportunity to provide a holistic overview of your achievements and contextualize the rest of your page, but it’s also a chance to let your
unique personality shine through. At the end of the day, employers want to hire for cultural fit as much as skill.
If your summary contains the right set of skills and reputed achievements there are high chances of your profile being preferred over others.
3. Avoid grammatical errors
When we are talking about a perfect LinkedIn summary, we are expecting ZERO grammatical errors in that. If you mention everything about your skills, achievements, career, and everything but your grammar is not right, it might leave a bad impression on the viewer.
So while you write your LinkedIn summary make sure you use tools like Grammarly that can detect even the slightest grammatical errors. Or else you can proofread yourself and rectify your summary where you find faults.
4. Optimize it as per your industry type
A LinkedIn summary is useful for professionals in a variety of industries, as it can be powerful for users looking for new job opportunities. This is because recruiters frequently use LinkedIn to actively search for keywords relating to a specific job description and find profiles that may match the role. Therefore, LinkedIn users should optimize their profile summary according to their requirements.
If you are looking for a job, optimize your summary as a resume. If you are a recruiter, optimize it with company details, your position, experience, and other necessary details.
5. Use First Person approach
Nobody wants to know about you from the third person. They want to listen directly to you. In order for your LinkedIn profile to stand out, your summary should be written in the first person, stuffed with the right keywords, concise, attention-grabbing, and flows naturally.
Also, make sure to maximize the expertise section part—that’s how clients will find you! When you address yourself in this manner, you increase the effectiveness of your summary.
6. Put a clear call to action in your summary
A well-written call to action (CTA) sentence always saves the day. When you have explained everything, you should inform about the next steps to take after that. It can be anything like “Email me to know more about myself”, or “Drop a hi in DM to start a conversation”.
Such sleek CTAs add a personal touch to the reader and increase the chance of interaction and grabbing the lying opportunity.
7. Share success stories from your past work
Some of the best summaries have a passion at their core. Disclosing what you enjoy doing gives your job more context. Set aside your work title and explain what you do in the
most basic terms possible. Cite the most important learning from your experience. If you can, consolidate successes from different roles.
For example, if you are an experienced digital marketer, you can share the growth of your previous clients, names of big clients that you have worked with, and other such details.
These stories highlight your values in a very subtle and authentic way. You all know the impact of storytelling. So, better prepare a better one for yourself.
8. Do not COPY PASTE
Sometimes it happens with the newcomers. They start using LinkedIn and don’t know much about the platform. What they do is just copy-paste the LinkedIn summary of someone whom they find interesting.
Never do this. Taking inspiration is one thing but doing this is not advised. Whatever is suitable for others might harm your online identity badly. So remain original. If you can’t explain much, write a small summary. This is a far better approach.
