Your LinkedIn Summary and Skills: Make the Changes Work for You

As I've been writing a lot about recently, the LinkedIn user interface has recently changed a lot. Now more than ever, it's important to get your LinkedIn Summary right if you want your profile to stand out from the competition. Here we take a look at the best ways to shine in the face of the changes.

Image from Flickr

Start Strong

You’ve probably noticed that now only the first 220 words of your Summary are visible before the person viewing your profile has to click on “See More.” This is good news as it means you don’t have to write as much, but it does mean that it is more critical to get your first two lines right.

To make yourself stand out you should state straight away how you can make life easier for employers or customers, and consider explaining how you solve specific problems unique to your industry or position. Try to avoid talking immediately about how amazing or incredible you are, because that is annoying, and frankly - it makes most people nauseous and incredulous. In a not-good way!

Similarly, don't launch straight away into telling us that you have 25 years experience. This might not be seen as a good thing, unfortunately.

Instead, consider talking about the pain points that you have identified in job adverts, or if you are writing to attract more clients, consider what problems your clients think they have. Remembering that what their problem is, and what you think their problem is, might be subtly different. Where do they think the pain is coming from? How do you solve it?

In that all-so-important 220 characters, talk about how you are a solution to their pain. Show what your specific expertise is by stating how you have solved this in your past experience...

Be Easy to Find

If you haven’t included your contact details in your background image then the first two lines of your Summary would be the place to do so. (See here why and how you might want to consider changing your background image, and about how your professional headline feeds the algorithm.)

With LinkedIn’s new user interface you need to look to the right [an unnatural action, most people look to the left], and click on ‘see more’ to be able to see somebody's contact details.

Studies have shown that the more we are forced to scroll down, to click, to search - the less interested we become. Remember that potential employers are busy people too; they don’t want to spend time trying to find your now hidden contact details!

Think of yourself as a commodity - make yourself as easy as possible to buy.

Below is how I’ve organised the first two lines of my summary. I offer solutions to profile and resume problems, highlighting my phone number and location. This makes it instantly obvious what I do, and how people can get in touch with me.

Add Extra Value

You should also make sure you have something extra to offer those users who do click “See More.” Use these additional 2,000 characters (including spaces), to elaborate on why you do what you do, how you do it, and who you do it for - your areas of expertise. You can even upload your resume or other information (presentations, articles, video links), that highlight your skills and experience.

Reorder Your Skills

Another change LinkedIn has recently made to its user interface is the Skills section. There used to be 10 skills openly displayed with images of the people who endorsed you, followed by 15 further skills showing how many people have endorsed you for each. Now this section has been cut dramatically so only 3 of your skills are instantly visible.

This may not necessarily be a bad thing – we Australians don’t tend to be comfortable with praise, especially when it comes from people who may not even have seen our work...

However, these changes mean that you have to make sure the three skills displayed are those that best describe your strengths and align with your career goals.

The skills that are now instantly visible on your LinkedIn profile are pushed together without images, and this new change means that you are losing nothing by deleting skills that are similar to each other, or don’t reflect where you want your career to go.

Delete and Reorder

To delete skills you no longer need on your profile:

• Click the blue pencil icon at the top right of your Skills section, which will bring up all your skills.
• Clicking this icon again when all your skills have appeared will bring up a red stop sign icon to the left of each skill.
• Click this to delete any skill you want to remove.

If you don’t want to delete any skills, you can reorder them instead. This is a good way of making sure the skills that best represent your career goals are instantly visible to those viewing your profile. To do this, instead of clicking the stop sign icon at the left of a skill, click and drag the four lines on the right of each skill (known as 'hamburgers' incidentally), to change their position.

Getting Endorsements

Now that the LinkedIn interface has changed, it’s more important than ever to grow your Skills section strategically rather than relying on organic growth. Endorsements are now likely to be much harder to get. This is because LinkedIn has listened to our complaints, and is now only prompting users to endorse you for ONE SKILL AT A TIME – and this is ONLY if you have the same skill, or share work history, such as having worked on the same project or at the same company.

To increase your endorsements despite these changes you may now need to ask for them. Yes, this sounds cheeky, but your contacts will not mind if you do it in a jovial, no-pressure way. Every time somebody praises your work, get into the habit of asking them if they will endorse you next time they’re on LinkedIn.

Ask with a wink and a smile - because nobody likes feeling pressured to give.

Because, as we’re all rapidly discovering in this increasingly loud world, you don’t get what you don’t ask for!

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Interested in a resume review or expert guidance on using LinkedIn so that you can be found fast?

Contact me on 0404 083 678 or [email protected]

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