Highlighting Skills On Your LinkedIn Profile

Anyone can build a LinkedIn profile but not everyone is going to have a good one. The skills section is one piece of the picture. Ensure that all aspects of the profile tell a cohesive story that stands out. The goal is a profile attractive to recruiters and visitors.

By Ciarra Maraj 

Professionals, recruiters and students use LinkedIn for different reasons. Finding people in the same field, connecting with alumni from college and landing a job can be done on the platform. For job-seeking purposes, highlight skills in the appropriate areas to optimize your profile.

A Linkedin profile with highlighted skills becomes a searchable profile. Job-seekers with developed profiles have better chances of connecting with recruiters. And job offers come to those who take advantage of LinkedIn tools. 

“Recruiters at large organizations that have LinkedIn Recruiter will use parameters to find profiles,” said career coach and one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices of 2019, Bob McIntosh. “The profiles that have the desired skills will be tagged by the search engine. Said skills come from the Skills area.” 

The Skills to Highlight and Personal Branding

What type of skills should a profile have? 

“You've gotta highlight both your hard skills and your soft skills,” said career coach Kevin D. Turner.  “Hard skills are easier to determine, right? They're measurable. Do you have PowerPoint capability? Or can you code in Azure? Those things are hard skills.” 

Soft skills shine through the biography and profile activity.

Highlighting hard skills builds credibility in an area of expertise, said Diana YK Chan, a career coach and one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices of 2022. 

“It's also gonna help people to find you easier…You [want to] highlight more of your functional skills instead of your soft skills, you need functional skills in your area of expertise,” Chan said. 

Including skills helps build a personal brand. Skills attained from a specific job experience can now be included in the experience section, which is listed above the skills section on LinkedIn profiles. 

“Being able to show the skills you use in the experience section can be another way to brand yourself,” McIntosh said. “You can bring the skills higher on your profile where they'll be seen.” 

This is important to someone’s brand because it helps show who they are. LinkedIn allows up to 50 skills on a profile.

“You don't have to highlight every single skill you have,” Turner said. “And you [want to] highlight the ones that make you stand out…So that you're displaying the right skills that you have that are better than anybody else within your area.” 

The profile headline is a part of personal branding. Chan suggests highlighting the top three skills that are functional and industry-specific. 

“I always recommend to prioritize those top three because that's what's really visible for people,” Chan said. “And that should align with the top three that you have also indicated in your tagline as well.

“So there's some sort of alignment to help strengthen…the perception of how people see you.”

Profile Mistakes and Their Remedies 

Avoid what Turner calls “personal blanding.” He describes it as throwing everything in a profile without any flow or story. 

Adding too much information is bland but so is not adding enough. 

“Regarding the skills area, too many LinkedIn users don't build it up,” McIntosh said. “So, when they lose their job and must show strengths in the skills they've listed, they're behind.” 

“One (mistake) is the bare bone profile so that they haven't done anything to it, or it's just really the basics of like their job title without much personality or much context to it,” Chan said. “Another one is not being active…to showcase that you want to meet others as well.”

This is LinkedIn. The point is to connect with other professionals. 

“If you want to build your network, build your connections, you [want to] show that you have a warm and welcoming profile as well,” Chan said.

How can a person go from “personal blanding” to personal branding?

“That's a perfect question,” Turner said. “It's really about getting your focus, understanding who that audience is, what are their needs? How do you address that? And then how do you come up with it, crafting it in a memorable way?”

Ensuring a profile is fully optimized is key to avoiding mistakes, Chan said.

“Optimizing your headline to make it clear and specific of what you do, what you have to offer and what you're known for,” Chan said. “Second is really utilizing the bio section, which is, I call it the prime real estate space to really tell your story of who you are, what you're really great at, what your top skills are. Great story with a call to action.

“Third is also optimizing your experience section…Sometimes the default job titles internally may not translate externally. So you may also want to elaborate what that looks like.”

Skills support a career story; leverage them the correct way.

“It's fine if you have 50 skills relevant to Project Management, but if you can't list them in sentences, the Skills area is fluff. You need to prove what you assert,” Mcintosh said.

Final Thoughts 

LinkedIn has many features to help a profile stand out. Take advantage. 

“LinkedIn's got some incredible tools to help people figure out what their skills are or what they should be presenting,” Turner said. “...You wanna present the ones that are in high demand. And so one of those I think is incredible is Career Explorer. It's on the LinkedIn GitHub.

“...That's one of the best places to kind of get this kind of skills gap analysis going because often we have the skills, we just didn't know that we didn't bring 'em into our content. And so to me, Career Explorer helps us discover when we're not getting the word out.” 

Follow Chan’s recipe to profile optimization for a higher chance of standing out. 

“You wanna increase your marketability okay, increase your visibility, increase your credibility and likability,” Chan said. “The marketability is essentially around improving your brand, improving your LinkedIn profile. Including…your marketing materials that will help you stand out. And the visibility is being active… The credibility is really showing the proof, which is like what you're known for.

“...The likability is really the soft skills, which is really the communication skills, relationship skills, the listening skills, all of that is also gonna help you show more warmth, more charisma. So all those things are [going to] help you with differentiating, standing out, to attract opportunities.”

Think of a profile as a digital business card, she added. 

Also, remember the audience when building a LinkedIn profile and highlighting skills. 

“I'm not saying LinkedIn users should dump a ton of skills on their profile — that's obnoxious,” McIntosh said. “But being considerate of those reading their profiles, they should write a strong narrative that mentions the 50 skills at which they're strongest. And, when hiring authorities or visitors are doing a search, they would see your profile with the desired skills highlighted.”

Top Takeaways 

Highlighting Skill On Your LinkedIn Profile

• Ensure that featured skills tell a story.
• Make the skills relevant; you can add up to 50 but focus on the top three.
• A good skills section is included on a good profile. Invest time in building one.
• Personal branding, not personal blanding.
• The goal is to leverage all of LinkedIn’s features to have an outstanding profile.