Should I add Experience description on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn has become an essential platform for professionals to build their personal brand and network. With over 740 million users worldwide, LinkedIn offers valuable opportunities to connect with colleagues, clients, and recruiters. One way to maximize your LinkedIn profile is by crafting compelling experience descriptions that highlight your skills and achievements.

What are experience descriptions?

Experience descriptions on LinkedIn allow you to provide detailed overviews of your work history. They expand on your job titles and companies by showcasing what you accomplished in each role. You can include responsibilities, projects, skills gained, and results achieved through metrics and examples.

Experience descriptions give context around your career path. They demonstrate how your qualifications align with the needs of hiring managers and business partners. Well-written descriptions also enable your connections to understand your capabilities so they can endorse you or recommend you for opportunities.

Should you add experience descriptions?

Here are some key reasons why adding experience descriptions can benefit your LinkedIn presence:

• Showcases your skills and achievements: Experience descriptions allow you to go in-depth about your expertise, knowledge, and track record of success. This level of detail is not captured simply through job titles and organizations.
• Provides credibility and trust: Detailed descriptions convey greater authenticity and substance. Recruiters are more likely to view you as a serious candidate worth interviewing.
• Differentiates you from other applicants: Vague, barebones profiles blend together. Rich experience descriptions help you stand out from the crowd and underline why you deserve to be considered for a role.
• Enhances your searchability: Profiles with experience descriptions tend to rank higher in LinkedIn search results because they contain more keywords related to industries and specialties.
• Gives connections insights: The people in your network better understand your background and capabilities so they can make informed endorsements and recommendations.

In short, robust experience descriptions strengthen your personal brand, capture attention, and deliver relevant information to your target audience on LinkedIn.

How to write effective experience descriptions

Follow these best practices when crafting LinkedIn experience descriptions:

• Lead with an accomplishment: Start each description with an achievement statement that grabs interest upfront. For example, “Reduced customer onboarding time by 50% by optimizing workflow processes.”
• Focus on results: Quantify outcomes and impact through metrics like percentage increases in sales or productivity. Back up claims with specific data.
• Use keywords strategically: Incorporate industry jargon and job titles relevant to your field. This boosts your search visibility and helps you get discovered more easily.
• Emphasize transferable skills: Highlight competencies like leadership, analysis, creativity, and relationship building that translate across roles and sectors.
• Be concise: Experience descriptions should be compact blocks of text that are scannable for recruiters. Avoid excessive wordiness.
• Match job requirements: Tailor descriptions to use language from job postings you are targeting so your qualifications align.
• Focus on value added: Illustrate how you drove innovation, solved problems, improved processes, and added value in each position. Quantify the business impact.

Additionally, experience descriptions should be written from a first-person perspective using active voice and a professional tone. Proofread carefully to avoid typos, repetition, and unclear phrasing.

What information to include

Each experience description you add to your LinkedIn profile should contain:

• Job Title
• Company Name
• Employment Dates
• Location
• An Objective or Summary
• Key Responsibilities and Achievements
• Skills Demonstrated
• Results and Quantifiable Metrics

You can also highlight projects completed, technologies used, certifications earned, and major contributions to the business.

Ideal Length

LinkedIn recommends keeping experience descriptions at least 3-4 lines or 100 words long. Very brief 1-2 line summaries fail to provide enough value. At the same time, being too verbose can cause readers to lose interest.

Aim for descriptions in the range of 100-500 words. Anything exceeding 500 words risks being too lengthy. Find a balance between depth and brevity.

Length Guidelines by Industry

Ideally, the length of your experience descriptions should vary based on your industry and career level:

As shown in the table, technology roles warrant more verbose descriptions highlighting specialized skills and projects. Senior executives also require lengthier profiles capturing leadership accomplishments.

On the other hand, industries like healthcare and education often need slightly shorter descriptions due to the nature of the work. The same applies to entry-level candidates with fewer years of experience.

Key Elements to Exclude

When writing LinkedIn experience descriptions, leave out:

• Non-metric subjective claims: Avoid vague, unsubstantiated statements like “significantly improved performance.” Use hard numbers instead.
• Overly formal language: You want your tone to be professional but approachable. Don’t overdo it with fancy vocabulary.
• Mundane day-to-day tasks: Focus only on high-impact accomplishments, not routine admin work or activities.
• Confidential information: Never reveal anything proprietary, sensitive, or private about employers, clients, or projects.
• Criticism of companies or people: Stay positive. The last thing you want is a lawsuit over defamation.

The goal is to highlight achievements that make you stand out as an impressive candidate. Mundane details only distract from that objective.

Optimizing for Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)

Most large organizations use ATS software to screen candidates at high volumes. This automation scans profiles for relevant keywords and data points.

To ensure your descriptions get picked up:

• Integrate keywords from the job posting like “project management”, “customer retention”, “strategic planning”.
• Mention specific skills like fluency in SQL, HubSpot, Tableau, etc.
• Include numbers, dates, percentages, and named entities.
• Use a simple layout with consistent formatting to avoid confusing the parser.
• Place important information like certifications, education, and programming languages in bold.

Refreshing Your Descriptions

It’s important to update your LinkedIn experience descriptions every 1-2 years. This keeps the information current as your progress through new roles and expand your capabilities.

Reasons to refresh your content include:

• Taking on more senior positions with greater responsibility
• Achieving new accomplishments as you complete major projects
• Gaining proficiency with new technologies, methodologies, or processes
• Earning certificates and educational credentials
• Wanting to reframe experiences based on career changes
• Improving the way you articulate value to be more compelling

Outdated descriptions with stale, irrelevant content do you no favors. Continually elevate your profile as your career advances.

Tips for Updating Descriptions

• Review your profile alongside the latest version of your resume to identify gaps.
• Study current “dream” job postings for hot keywords to integrate.
• Ask colleagues to review your draft content to get an outside perspective.
• Re-assess old experiences with the benefit of hindsight for new insights.
• Tie past accomplishments to present skills mastered over time.

Should I Add Examples?

Examples can strengthen your experience descriptions by providing tangible evidence of achievements. However, you need to be careful about confidentiality.

Here are some guidelines on using examples:

• Keep them brief – 1-3 sentences at most.
• Do not reveal any sensitive, non-public, or restricted information.
• Avoid specifics about clients, volunteers, patients, or students.
• Make sure you have permission to share if needed.
• Focus on what the example demonstrates about your capabilities.

If crafted thoughtfully, a short illustrative example can capture attention and showcase your skills in action.

Good Examples

• “Researched and wrote a 50-page market analysis report on expansion opportunities in Southeast Asia resulting in the launch of a new regional office.”
• “Led development of a new CRM system that centralized customer data and improved sales team productivity by 25%.”
• “Oversaw $500K website redesign project involving stakeholder interviews, RFPs, vendor selection, and post-launch performance reviews.”

Poor Examples

• “Worked with ACME Company to improve their manufacturing process.” (Too vague, identifies client)
• “Wrote lesson plans on religion for the 10th grade world history class.” (Reveals sensitive information)
• “Negotiated purchase of new hospital equipment from Johnson Medical Supplies.” (Too much unimportant detail)

How Many Experiences to Include?

As a rule of thumb, you should feature experience descriptions for your last 3-5 roles. Go into more detail on recent positions and be more selective summarizing distant past jobs, especially early in your career.

Reasons to prioritize recent experience:

• Most relevant to recruiters and demonstrates your current capabilities
• Hiring managers focus less on what you did 5-10 years ago
• Earlier roles may be outdated or no longer accurately reflect your expertise
• Keeps your profile focused and easier to quickly scan

However, it can be appropriate to reach farther back for certain types of highly valued experience like:

• Founding or leading a major initiative or organization
• Working at a prominent, well-known company
• Highlighting a distinct change in your career path
• Big achievement that shaped your trajectory
• Relevant academic background and credentials

Should I Include All Positions?

Be selective – you do not need to exhaustively list every job, especially short-term roles under 1 year. Relevant highlights are more persuasive than comprehensive histories.

Instances when you SHOULD omit experiences include:

• Roles not related to current career goals
• Very brief temporary stints like internships
• Ancient positions from over 10-15 years ago
• Jobs ending on a bad note or with no major accomplishments
• Repeated similar positions at the same level that become redundant

The key is carefully curating experience descriptions that showcase your value as clearly as possible to the intended audience.

Conclusion

Detailed experience descriptions on LinkedIn are valuable for communicating your qualifications and achievements to connections and recruiters. They set you apart from candidates with minimal profiles.

Make sure to highlight results, provide an optimal amount of information suited to the industry and career level, and refresh your content regularly.

Well-crafted descriptions that demonstrate the unique value you deliver in roles can dramatically raise interest and opportunities.