The 10 most overused words in LinkedIn profiles

An analysis reveals the most common adjectives employed by the 187 million members of the social network. How many of these words are in your profile?

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Or so they say.

For the second consecutive year, “creative” earned the dubious title of the most overused buzzword in LinkedIn profiles. In fact, the top three buzzwords remained unchanged from last year: “creative,” “organizational,” and “effective.”

However, there are some changes among this year’s top 10. In a blog post this morning, LinkedIn Senior Data Scientist Simla Ceyhan said:

“More members this year described themselves as ‘responsible’ and ‘analytical,’ which made an appearance on our ranking for the first time. As a result, ‘dynamic’ and ‘communication skills’ got knocked off the list. ‘Motivated’ is now ranked higher than ‘extensive experience,’ which was the top buzzword in 2010.”

To determine the rankings, LinkedIn collects the adjectives found in the summary section of users’ public profiles, removing overused nouns and certain irrelevant words. It then sorts them by frequency and country.

This year, the social network’s member base swelled to 187 million globally from 135 million in 2011.

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