LinkedIn: ‘About’ Section

The ‘About’ section is one of the most important parts of any LinkedIn profile. If you have experience, it is the perfect spot to organize some of the highlights of your background. Regardless of your level of experience, talk about things you did well, skills that are well developed as well as ones you would like to improve in the future. If you are actively seeking a job or internship, the summary should be a little bit about what you have already done and a little about what you want to do next. Keep the focus on what you have to offer a future employer and the skills and accomplishments that distinguish you from others. You have 2,000 characters here to help define yourself. Use them well!

• Be sure to review job descriptions from your target job title or industry and use the same keywords you see used most often. For example, you may have in your resume that you have excellent “communication skills”. If all the job descriptions in your industry use the term “client-facing skills” (which is really the same skill) be sure to mimic the language you know they are using in your industry.
• If you are in a technical field, this is also a good place to list some of your strongest technical skills, even though there is another section for that later.
• If you have some accomplishments you really want to highlight, you can use a combination of paragraphs and bullets to break up the content visually.
• Unlike your resume where recruiters still expect to see a more impersonal representation of facts, with LinkedIn you can present yourself a little more personally and make it more of a narrative. For example, it is fine in LinkedIn to include first person narrative: “I have strong technical skills in…”. You can also include some content describing personal hobbies or other aspects of your life outside of work to showcase your human side, but remember to still present this content in a professional way.
• All of LinkedIn is highly keyword indexed, but the most important areas for you to ensure are keyword rich are: the About section, within the content of your Experience section, and in the Skills section. If each of these three areas are loaded with keywords, and your profile is complete, you are much more likely to come up in a recruiter’s search.