Don’t waste your work experience segment on your LinkedIn profile.
Your LinkedIn work experience serves as verifiable social proof of your value to a prospect.
It communicates what you do, your experience, and what you specialize in without having to directly tell them.
But, for some reason, not a lot of people fully optimize these fields.
In this guide, we take a look at how you can optimize your work experience on the platform to get people to convert.
What Should I Include?
First off, let’s start with what you should have in your work experiences area.
Don’t put everything down.
When in doubt, stick to your top five experiences.
Take note, not “jobs” but “experiences.”
Now, an experience doesn’t have to exactly be a job.
It can be volunteer work, a high-profile coaching session, an advisory role, an investment position, etc. Plus, it should also include the current role that you’re in.
Why?
Because it tells a story of who you are.
Every part of your LinkedIn profile should be optimized to help people get to know you. And, the only effective way of doing it – especially with digital media – is through storytelling.
So, what you do is list down your top 5 experiences, things that you are proud of, and start filling optimization each area.
Optimizing Each Experience Section
Now that you’ve picked five experiences, it’s time to optimize each one.
There are three things that matter:
- Summary of your Responsibilities
- Takeaways from the Experience
- Attachment
Summary of Your Responsibilities
You can either write a quick paragraph about what you did on a daily basis or four or five bullet points.
From a style and mobile optimization perspective, I’d advise you to use the latter, it makes it easier for a prospect to read through it.
Takeaways from the Experience
Tip: If you went with bullet points for the summary of your experience, then use the paragraph form for your takeaways. It helps with formatting and creates a nice break.
It also makes you seem more genuine about the things that you’ve learned since you took the time to write a brief paragraph about it.
Attachment
The attachment area turns your work experience area into another funnel – along with the rest of your profile.
You need to add something to each experience to make it more substantial.
This could be an example of your work, a link, a publication that you have been featured in (make sure you tag yourself as the co-author if you’ve been featured), and even testimonials from your clients or colleagues.
If you’re not going to include an attachment that can help provide additional proof or lead to another page, then consider changing out that particular LinkedIn work experience.
Optimizing Your Writing
Our mobile-first approach to LinkedIn is also applicable here.
Why?
Because a significant number of the people browsing your LinkedIn work experience are on mobile.
You want to keep your paragraphs as short as possible – three or four lines at most, to make sure that the people who are reading your experiences on mobile will find it easily digestible.
Additionally, we all know the effect that giant paragraphs have, they can easily overwhelm and people might avoid them altogether.
Keep your writing cordial and continue the tone that you started with in the summary section of your about section.
This allows a prospect to keep with the rhythm that you’ve set.
You’ll notice that if your prospect browses your work experience via desktop, your profile picture and headline will automatically become a sticky.
Make sure that whatever’s in your experience coincides with your job titles or goals in the headline you’re using.
Advanced Optimization: Create Company Pages for Each Experience
Let me present you with two scenarios:
- You’ve had two major roles in your current company, but those roles are both significant and independent of each other;
- You want to create a bonafide click funnel on your experiences section highlighting your different roles, and different links for your prospects to click on.
If you’re like most growth hackers, the second scenario is more likely to happen.
But, here’s the problem.
LinkedIn will group different roles you have in the company under a singular section. In turn, this makes it a larger intimidating section, and it removes the order in your profile.
What you want to do is to create multiple company profile pages, for the different experiences that you have.
Say you have three things you want to highlight, your company, a book that you’ve released, and a new range of products.
It would make sense to create a company page for each “division” so that LinkedIn can divide up the experiences section for you and allow you to add different attachments for each.
You could put in a link to your landing page for the company in the first section, a copy of your eBook on the next, and a brochure to your new line of products on the third.
This is exactly how I hacked my profile to make sure that I can highlight the things that I do while giving my prospects time to examine my work for each – even though it’s from a singular company.
I divided up my work at BAMF, my writing, and my contribution to learning at the BAMF academy.
Arranging Your LinkedIn Work Experience
Remember, your LinkedIn Work Experience section might look like a section of your resume, but it’s only supposed to “look” that way not “be” exactly like one.
In a traditional resume, you want your work experience to appear in chronological order with your latest job appearing first.
However, it doesn’t work that way on LinkedIn.
You need to rearrange the jobs that you have to make sure that your top job or experience appears first. This makes it easier to develop the social proof that you need to show prospects on your profile that you’re a high-value individual.
Think about it this way.
We’ve all had at least a couple of jobs or experiences in the past, but do you want to be known for all of them?
The average prospect might not have time to go through everything that you have experienced in the past, and this is why it is critical to show them one job where you took the lead or that you’re extremely proud of.
Also, it affects your LinkedIn SEO and how the platform automatically pulls up information about you.
Have you optimized your Linked SEO lately? Check out our comprehensive guide on the subject today.
Here’s another important consideration.
Say you’re consulting or advising a new company, it might be a part-time or contractual role, but it is more recent than your day job. You want to make sure that this is not what appears first in your work experience.
Takeaways
Think of your LinkedIn profile as your landing page on the platform.
It might seem trivial to optimize even something as small as your LinkedIn work experience, but it plays its own significant role in the grand scheme of things.
Would you leave any element of your landing page unoptimized?
We’ve seen website landing pages be A/B tested for colors, CTA size, and even saw copy changed by the word to make sure that it converts well.
In the same manner, you should pay attention to the completion of your entire LinkedIn profile.
Real growth hackers leave no stone unturned.
They are constantly on the look for ways that they can do better and improve on the materials that they already have out there.
So, take a look at your work experience, does it need tweaking?
