Two often neglected sections of a your LinkedIn profile are your summary (basically your bio) and specialties box. The specialities is a bunch of keywords that recruiters, customers, suppliers will use to search and find your profile. In spite of this, all too often people don’t even bother to fill either section in.
Summary section
Why should you fill it in? For starters, it gives the reader a quick overview of who you are, what you do, what you are looking for and most importantly, what you can do for them. No one is going to scroll down and scrutinize every position you have ever had or take their time to deduce what skills you possess by looking at your groups and associations.
You want to start out your summary with who you are and what you do most of the time. Then write what you can do for others and why people would want to engage with you. This is likely to be a list of achievements, and if so make sure you quantify them as much as possible. You want your summary to stand out and the reader to think they need to take action and speak with you pronto. In the example I have once again used Chris Brogan, his summary is a bit on the long side but then again he is spinning a lot of plates at one time.
Example: Chris Brogan’s Summary
“As president of New Marketing Labs, my role is to build and execute strategies for companies seeking to engage their community via the social web. We focus on four core areas: listening, content marketing, community management, and outreach programs. Acting as a hybrid social media PR/communications organization, New Marketing Labs extends your other channels into the new world of the web.
I also operate the Inbound Marketing Summit conferences, a series of events dedicated to educating businesses on the potential of Internet marketing and communications and featuring the brightest practitioners available. We run several single day Inbound Marketing Bootcamp events all over the US as well. (Contact me to discuss scheduling one for your area).
Outside of work, I speak at several conferences a year and blog about social media business strategy at http://www.chrisbrogan.com. My blog is in the Technorati Top 100 and the Advertising Age Top 20.
I am co-founder of the new media community conference series, PodCamp, and am co-founder of the Secret Society of Marketers. I am co-author of the New York Times Bestselling Trust Agents, with Julien Smith.”
Specialities
So what’s specialities all about? This is a bit simpler than the summary as it’s only a bunch of keywords strung together for others to find you via the LinkedIn search tool. Think back 5-10 years ago when web pages were cluttered with keywords as it would help their search engine ranking. This is no longer the case on the Internet but still applies on LinkedIn.
The keywords can be your past titles, your skills and names of companies, applications, industries, countries etc that you have experience from. It can sometimes be hard to come up with more than 10 keywords so break out your thesaurus and have a look at your co-workers’ profiles and get some ideas. The example here is from my own LinkedIn profile.
Example Specialities (from my own profile)
“Social Recruiting, Personal Branding, Social Recruiting, Consultant, Trainer, Blogger, Speaker, Sales, Management, Recruitment, Headhunting, Resumes, CV, Cover Letter, Bio, Social Media, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Writing, Technology, SAP, Marketing, Personal Development, Life Skills, Online Strategy, Toastmasters, Seminars, Germany, UK, Sweden, USA”
Call to action
As the title says, please do me this favor and fill these in as you will increase your chances of being found by anyone on LinkedIn. This not only applies to job seekers but to everyone that is open to opportunities in their industry. Let me know if you have any questions?
Be sure to check out How To Make Google Love Your LinkedIn Profile as well.
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