In-House Counsel

How To Write A LinkedIn Summary That Lands You A Job Interview

If you want to rank higher in search results, you need a keyword optimized LinkedIn summary.

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linkedin-logoIf you’re job searching for a new legal role, or looking to transition your legal career, updating your LinkedIn profile is a priority. After all, your LinkedIn profile is the gateway to getting seen and noticed by company CEOs, general counsels, legal recruiters, managing partners at law firms, and business contacts.

The “about” section, also known as your LinkedIn summary, gives you enormous visibility and the opportunity to share your career story. Most lawyers and corporate counsels fall short of having a powerful LinkedIn summary. Quite often, they dump the professional summary of their resume or their law firm bio into their profile and think they’ve done enough to give a proper overview of their career. As a certified LinkedIn profile writer and career expert (who writes dozens of LinkedIn profiles a month for partner-level lawyers and general counsels), I want you to know there is an actual strategy and art to writing an effective LinkedIn summary to generate job-seeking attention and interviews.

Write Your LinkedIn Summary In First-Person

Your LinkedIn summary should be written in a first-person, conversational style format that enables you to create a personal connection with the people who land on your profile. Copying and pasting your law firm’s bio or your executive bio from the company’s website will not get you the right visibility. Typically, website bios are written without a focus on SEO (search engine optimization), and therefore, lack a strategic focus on the keywords commonly seen in job postings and searched for on LinkedIn. Bios are also boring to read, they lack flair, and they often lose a reader’s attention quickly.

Dumping your resume into your LinkedIn summary is also a big no-no. Your resume is a proprietary document that is intended for a hand-selected audience, one that you curate, whereas your LinkedIn profile is viewable by more than 700 million users. Why would you allow your resume to be in the hands of 700 million sets of eyes, and potentially plagiarized?

Remember, LinkedIn has high domain authority, which means it populates at the top of Google searches when someone looks up your name. Therefore, someone is more apt to land on your LinkedIn profile when they Google you. They will want to gain deeper insights into your career, see who you’re connected to, and what activity you post.

Use Short Paragraphs And Bullet Points For Easy Formatting

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Keep in mind, your LinkedIn profile will likely be read on a mobile device. Long blocks of text are challenging to digest and often lose the reader’s attention quickly. You want your LinkedIn summary paragraphs to be short, terse, and easy to comprehend.

A good rule of thumb is to keep your LinkedIn summary paragraphs to no longer than four or five lines. It’s expected that you’ll have at least three or four short paragraphs within your profile. You can consider using bullet points to create sections within your summary to list your areas of focus or board leadership.

Open With Your Career Level, Years Of Experience, And Areas Of Expertise

The first few lines of your LinkedIn profile will show up on the mobile version as well as the desktop version. Those initial 75 characters of your profile are the most important pieces of real estate — you want to allure the reader with your skill set. Don’t waste the valuable space by saying, “Hi, welcome to my profile, here’s info about me.”

Think about the keywords that a recruiter, senior executive, company founder, or business contact will search for when trying to find a corporate counsel with deep mergers and acquisitions experience. They’re not going to head to the query search bar at the top of LinkedIn and type in “M&A rockstar.” Let the reader know your career level, major areas of focus, and the types of companies or firms you’ve worked at.

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Here are a few examples for opening your LinkedIn summary that have worked for my lawyer clients in landing job interviews:

  • If you’re a chief compliance officer, you’ll want to mention it in the very opening sentence of your LinkedIn summary. Discuss your subject matter expertise in driving compliance for Fortune 500 companies and your biggest areas of focus such as compliance training programs, ethics, data privacy, and anti-corruption.
  • If you’re a general counsel, let people know it (in addition to being a hybrid executive vice president and corporate secretary), and include an overview of your experience leading mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, and other capital markets transactions in the oil and gas industry for publicly traded companies (or private equity firms).
  • If you’re a senior associate attorney at a top-rated commercial litigation firm, you’ll want to discuss the types of clients you represent and the types of matters you handle (example: private family offices in securities litigation and financial disputes). If you’re in Biglaw, don’t be afraid to name-drop the Am Law 100 firms you’ve worked at, or that you have an LLM in tax. Remember, a legal recruiter may be looking for someone with specific experience in family office matters that has worked at an Am Law 100 firm and holds an LLM in tax.

Don’t know what keywords to use in your LinkedIn summary? Start analyzing job postings and look at the repetition of the keywords used. Also, go to the LinkedIn search bar (the white query bar at the top of LinkedIn) and do a search for “Corporate Counsel Mergers and Acquisitions.” Look to see who is populating at the top of LinkedIn for that specific role and area of focus. You will notice usage of that keyword throughout their profile summary (and likely their headline).

Include Soft Skills And Personalize Your Summary 

Don’t forget to include a few sentences of soft skills that describe who you are as a lawyer and a leader. What do clients value about your work? What energizes you in your daily work? Think about soft skills that would stand out to a recruiter or hiring executive that make you unique.

Consider ending your LinkedIn summary with personal interests that could create common ground for future conversations with connections. Ran the Boston Marathon? Climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro? Traveled to over 40 countries? Visited all seven continents? Think of these as good icebreakers for an interview — often they give more insights into you personally.

If you’re currently in transition between roles, let your audience know you’re open to new career opportunities for corporate counsel roles, for example.

These are some tips to get you started. Have a question about writing a powerful LinkedIn summary? Feel free to drop me a line on LinkedIn, Twitter, or via email.

Wendi Weiner is an attorney, career expert, and founder of The Writing Guru, an award-winning executive resume writing services company. Wendi creates powerful career and personal brands for attorneys, executives, and C-suite/Board leaders for their job search and digital footprint. She also writes for major publications about alternative careers for lawyers, personal branding, LinkedIn storytelling, career strategy, and the job search process. You can reach her by email at wendi@writingguru.net, connect with her on LinkedIn, and follow her on Twitter @thewritingguru.  

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