How To Write Your Best LinkedIn Summary: My Easy 4-Step Formula

According to a study by Jobvite, an astonishing 87% of recruiters find LinkedIn most effective for vetting candidates.

Having worked at LinkedIn myself, I can attest to this.

The amount of tools that LinkedIn offers from a recruiter’s perspective makes it the go-to source of information, so it’s important to make sure your LinkedIn profile is optimized, preferably to all-star status.

Many sections of a LinkedIn profile are pretty easy to put together, such as your experience and skills sections.

But, there’s one big piece of a LinkedIn profile that provides near infinite opportunities as well as pitfalls, and that’s your LinkedIn summary.

After speaking with dozens of recruiters and running several experiments of my own, I’ve come up with my perfect LinkedIn summary. This summary boosted my LinkedIn profile views by over 245% and landed me over 10+ interviews.

In this post, I’ll share my formula for creating a great LinkedIn summary and I’ll even show you how I applied these techniques to my own summary.

The 4 Parts to a Solid LinkedIn Summary

In general, the format that we’ll be following for our LinkedIn Summary is:

1. Short introduction to who you are
2. Linear story of your work experience
3. Something impressive you’ve done outside your career
4. What you’re doing now and why you’ll be valuable to a team

Here is my formula for writing a great LinkedIn Summary that you can use to write your own:

1) Short Introduction to who you are

This might be the most difficult section to write, so I usually advise most people to write this section last. The first paragraph of your LinkedIn summary is arguably the most important because it’s the only section that is shown “above the fold.”

“Above the fold” refers to the part of the LinkedIn summary that you can see immediately before you need to click that “see more” button. In many cases, if your first paragraph isn’t good, a recruiter won’t click “see more” and they’ll just quickly scroll through your profile to make their assessment of you.

Similar to your resume summary, this section needs to bring your reader in and intrigue them to want to know more about you.

So, how do you write an introduction paragraph that will get them to want to “see more?” Simple, just follow this formula:

1. Tell them your job title or rank - It’s important to be straightforward here because these are keywords they’ll be looking for.
   
   Things such as “I’m an engineer…” or “I’m an executive…” work well. Whatever you do, do NOT start this section with fluffy adjectives such as “I’m a passionate, committed, data-driven, blah blah blah.” Lots of people use words like this and they’re useless because there are no proof points to back them up (those come later).
   
   
2. Tell them 1-3 things that you do very well - Make sure you’re high-level and specific. Be high-level in that you share broad abilities here that can apply to many jobs so that you don’t pigeonhole yourself. But, be specific in that you’re sharing something that not everyone else is.
   
   Here’s an example:
   Less specific: “I help companies generate sales and grow revenue”
   More specific: “I help companies create sales systems that bring in consistent revenue.”
   
   As you can see, these are very similar, but the second example stands out because it’s giving an example of exactly what you can do.

Here is what this formula looks like in practice on my profile:

“I'm a creative Content Marketer who builds strategic campaigns, creates engaging content, and connects customers with forward-thinking ideas.”

Again, this is a hard piece to get right, so I recommend writing the other sections first and coming back to this. 

2) Linear Work Experience

This section of the LinkedIn Summary tends to be pretty easy to write because you’re essentially summarizing your career path. The two scenarios where this gets tricky is either if you’re a new grad with very little work experience or a professional with decades of experience.

Regardless of your experience level, however, I recommend keeping this section between 120-150 words and usually two short paragraphs. In this section you want to share where you started your career and how it has progressed. 

Two important points to keep in mind here:

1. Only include experience that is relevant to your target job. If you took a break from work or a detour into a completely different job, don’t add that here (we’ll have a spot to add that later).
2. Clearly articulate what skills you developed at each stage. This shouldn’t be a dull list of jobs you held, be sure to add some color and context so that the reader can understand why your career journey made you a better candidate.

Here is an example of the work experience I shared in my LinkedIn summary:

“I launched my career in the wonderful world of Hollywood, where I worked for the Emmy-award winning production house 44Blue. Working with the leading professionals in my field on shows such as Lockup on MSNBC and Pitbulls & Parolees on Animal Planet, I gained unique insights about creating hit entertainment that both educates and excites. After working my way up from production assistant, to camera-op, to production coordinator, I moved to the national branding agency Miles Media.

 

As Director of Photography at Miles Media, one of the largest agencies for the US travel industry, I directed over 58 travel campaigns across the United States. Working in different environments (literally), I developed the skills necessary to run a variety of campaigns and provide quality deliverables on tight deadlines. At Miles Media I managed production coordination, client interfacing, principal photography, commercials, and post production teams.”

There are about 3 more jobs that I took on during this time, but they don’t fit my career story arc, so I didn’t include them in the summary. You want to make sure that your career story reads clearly because a recruiter or hiring manager isn’t going to spend time untangling your career path.

Keep this part of your LinkedIn summary simple and straightforward.

If you're struggling for ideas on how to summarize your experience, you could also try using a free AI writing assistant like ChatGPT. Our friends at Teal have a great article on how to use ChatGPT for your LinkedIn profile here.

3) Something Impressive You’ve Done Outside Your Career

This next paragraph is where you add some character and color to your LinkedIn summary. The reason that we add this here, as opposed to the 1st or 2nd paragraphs, is because we needed to first establish our credentials. 

Remember, recruiters and hiring managers are very busy people so they don’t want to hear about your interesting facts until they know you could be a potential candidate. A lot of people make this mistake and try to be “unique” in their first paragraph, which in my experience doesn’t work very well.

Now that we’ve passed through the screening process, we can add some character to the summary that makes us stand out.

Some good topics you can use for this section are:

1. Volunteer experience
2. Side projects
3. Travel
4. Time off

Regardless which of these topics you pick for your LinkedIn summary, I recommend always tying it back to your professional life in some way. Here is what my paragraph looks like:

“In order to develop my skills beyond the commercial world, I invested time into producing a non-profit campaign called Risking Gravity. The campaign focused on telling the stories of 8 athletes in order to inspire kids to build community and gain a better education. While coordinating this overseas campaign I learned a completely new set of skills that expanded my understanding beyond video production. I developed social media campaigns, built WordPress sites, performed A/B testing, and measured ROI all within the acceptable confines of the non-profit's budget.”

If you’re having a hard time thinking of something impressive for this section, I recommend talking to a friend or family member who knows you well. When I was trying to figure out my “impressive” story all I could think was, “I haven’t really done anything that impressive.”

It was only after talking with my friend that I realized what I had done as a “fun project” could actually sound super impressive to a recruiter or hiring manager. The hardest part about this section is wording things correctly, so that what is essentially a fun project actually shows your deeper skills.

4) What You’re Doing Now and Why You’re Valuable

The last paragraph of your LinkedIn summary should serve as your punchline. This is where you tie everything back together to create your punchy ending. The trick to writing this section is to explain how where you’re at now makes you such a valuable team member.

Whether you have a lot of experience or very little experience, it doesn’t matter, there’s always a way to frame it in a positive way. Here is an example from one of my previous summaries:

“Currently at LinkedIn I am focused on producing content that drives demand for our B2B division. Combining our proprietary data with well-researched thought leadership content, my goal is to educate talent developers on how to build outstanding learning and development programs for their organizations.” 

The best way to formulate this paragraph of your LinkedIn summary is to combine:

1. What you currently do - Keep this short, since you’ve already described a lot of your experience above.
2. What your current company does - Hype up your current company’s strengths and use them to show off.

This is where you demonstrate that you are a great piece of the company you work for and they should want you as a piece of their company. In the above example, obviously I didn’t create our “proprietary data,” but I’m demonstrating how I’m using the company's strengths and adding to them.

If you’re currently unemployed, you can simply modify this to:

“At my last company, I focused on producing content that drove demand for our B2B division…”

Your Great New LinkedIn Summary

So, here is what all the pieces look like together in the LinkedIn summary I created:

I'm a creative Content Marketer who builds strategic campaigns, creates engaging content, and connects customers with forward-thinking ideas.

I launched my career in the wonderful world of Hollywood, where I worked for the Emmy-award winning production house 44Blue. Working with the leading professionals in my field on shows such as Lockup on MSNBC and Pitbulls & Parolees on Animal Planet, I gained unique insights about creating hit entertainment that both educates and excites. After working my way up from production assistant, to camera-op, to production coordinator, I moved to the national branding agency Miles Media.

 

As Director of Photography at Miles Media, one of the largest agencies for the US travel industry, I directed over 58 travel campaigns across the United States. Working in different environments (literally), I developed the skills necessary to run a variety of campaigns and provide quality deliverables on tight deadlines. At Miles Media I managed production coordination, client interfacing, principal photography, commercials, and post production teams.

 

In order to develop my skills beyond the commercial world, I invested time into producing a non-profit campaign called Risking Gravity. The campaign focused on telling the stories of 8 athletes in order to inspire kids to build community and gain a better education. While coordinating this overseas campaign I learned a completely new set of skills that expanded my understanding beyond video production. I developed social media campaigns, built WordPress sites, performed A/B testing, and measured ROI all within the acceptable confines of the non-profit's budget.

 

Currently at LinkedIn I am focused on producing content that drives demand for our B2B division. Combining our proprietary data with well-researched thought leadership content, my goal is to educate talent developers on how to build outstanding learning and development programs for their organizations. 

Now, the LinkedIn summary is just one part of your LinkedIn. To learn about how to optimize the rest of your LinkedIn profile, you can watch some of our free videos here.

LinkedIn is a very powerful tool for job searching. I highly recommend using the advanced LinkedIn search features to find open roles rather than simply waiting for them to show up in the general results.