# Elevator Speech Examples, and the Steps to Write Your Own Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence/elevator-speech-examples/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence/elevator-speech-examples.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving influence at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Two full elevator speech examples, plus the seven steps that turn one into a 30-second introduction that sounds like you instead of a memorized script. ## Key facts - Title: Elevator Speech Examples, and the Steps to Write Your Own - Category: Influence - Primary skill: Influence - Related skills: Communication, Networking - Primary keyword: elevator speech examples - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence/elevator-speech-examples/ ## What this page covers - Two full elevator speech examples, plus the seven steps that turn one into a 30-second introduction that sounds like you instead of a memorized script. - Practical guidance for elevator speech examples - How this topic connects to Influence ## Detailed explanation Someone asks what you do, you have about thirty seconds, and you hear yourself starting a sentence with no idea where it ends. That is the moment an elevator speech is meant to cover. Almost every elevator speech follows the same four-part shape: say who you are, say what you do or study, give one concrete thing you have actually done, and finish with a specific ask. Around 75 words, spoken in roughly 30 seconds, aimed at the particular person in front of you. Two full examples are below, followed by the steps for turning one into something that sounds like you rather than like the person who wrote it — the part most example collections leave out. ## Two elevator speech examples Read these for their shape rather than their wording — the content belongs to the speaker, the structure is what you can take. **A final-year student at a career fair:** > "Hi, I'm Maya. I'm in my final year of environmental science, and I spent last summer at a water utility doing sampling and data cleanup. I ended up rebuilding the spreadsheet the team logged results in, which cut their reporting time roughly in half. I'm looking for a graduate role where I can keep working with field data. Do you take graduates into your monitoring team?" **Someone two years into a first job, talking to a person whose career they would like to follow:** > "I'm Daniel — I do customer support at a logistics company, mostly the escalations nobody else wants. Last quarter I went through six months of tickets and found that about a third traced back to one confusing screen in the tracking portal. We changed the wording and the volume dropped. I'd like to move toward product work eventually. Would you be open to a twenty-minute call about how you made that move?" Three things are worth noticing. They contain the same four slots, in the same order. Career-services sources like Indeed and Zippia name them introduction, explanation, unique value proposition and call to action; marketing-oriented ones such as HubSpot call them hook, value, proof and ask. Same four boxes, different labels. Once you can see the boxes, every example becomes reusable rather than something to admire and abandon. Neither speaker describes themselves. There is no "hardworking," no "detail-oriented," no "passionate about" — the words career-advice sources most consistently tell people to delete. In their place sits one specific thing that happened. Neither is impressive, either: a summer job and a support role are not achievements anyone would put in a press release, and they work because they are concrete and small enough to be true. And both end with a question. This is the element most people leave off, and dropping it is the single most common failure in the format. Texas State University's career services publish a student example that closes with a direct one — asking whether the person has positions in that area of interest. Without an ask, you have delivered a pleasant paragraph and given the other person nothing to do with it, and the default thing to do with information is nothing. On length: 30 seconds and around 75 words are the figures that recur everywhere, with Grammarly setting a wider band of 50 to 200 words in under a minute. None of these come from a study — they are conventions passed between career-advice publishers. They are still useful: a word budget is the fastest way to catch the real problem, which is almost never bad wording but a [two-minute answer](/knowledge/communication/concise-communication/) to a thirty-second question. ## How to write your own elevator speech, step by step Seven steps, in order. Each depends on the one before it, and the two most often skipped are the fifth and seventh. ### 1. Decide who you are talking to before you write a word Write down the specific listener — a recruiter, an alum, someone doing the job you want — and one sentence about what they care about. This has to come first, because everything downstream depends on it. The reason a borrowed example never quite fits is that it was tuned to somebody else's listener. The consequence is that only the opening is fixed and the middle is variable. Maya's proof point works in front of an environmental employer and would be the wrong forty words in front of a data-engineering team. You are not writing one speech; you are writing one opening and a set of interchangeable middles. ### 2. Write down far more material than you can use Take a blank page and list everything: what you are studying, where you have worked, what you did there, what you are looking for. Several guides suggest numbering the page one to ten and filling it in. You want much more than 75 words, because choosing is easier than generating. This is where most people stall. They scan their own history for something impressive, find a part-time job and one internship, and conclude they have nothing to say. Usually the problem is that they are hunting for achievements when the thing worth naming is an ability — the part of the work they were unusually good at, which often has no job title attached. If that is where you are stuck, a read on [what you're actually good at](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) is a more productive twenty minutes than staring at your résumé again, and the free Job Skills Test gives you that kind of language to draw on. ### 3. Fill the four slots Now assign your material: opening identification, what you do or study, one concrete proof point, and the ask. One to two sentences each. You are placing material in boxes, not writing elegantly yet. Fill the ask box first if you are prone to leaving it empty. Make it small and specific: whether they take graduates, whether someone in another team is worth speaking to, whether you can send something over. A [small yes](/knowledge/influence/art-of-persuasion/) is a much better outcome than an impressive speech that ends in a handshake. ### 4. Cut it to about 75 words Now compress. Delete every self-describing adjective first — they cost words and buy nothing. Then delete context the listener does not need to follow the point. Then read it at a natural pace, not a rushed one, and time it. Cut only once you have a full draft: writing straight into the word budget produces a speech that is short and empty. ### 5. Say it out loud and fix whatever breaks This is the step almost everyone skips, and it does the most work. Read the draft aloud, mark every clause you cannot say in one breath and every phrase you would never use in conversation, and rewrite those lines. A clause-heavy sentence that reads fine on a page can be unsayable. Smartsheet suggests rehearsing in an actual elevator — from the top floor, then a middle floor, then the first to the third — so the compression is forced on you. Whatever survives the shortest ride was the load-bearing part all along. ### 6. Learn the shape, not the sentences Do not memorize the wording. Memorize the four slots and rebuild the sentences live, differently, each time. This runs against what most people do with a page of examples, which is to learn one by heart. The reason is audible. Recited text closes the conversation down — the other person waits politely for the end instead of interrupting with the question that would have made the exchange useful. Knowing the shape means an interruption costs you nothing. ### 7. Deliver it, then follow up [Open with a normal human exchange](/knowledge/networking/networking-conversation-starters/) rather than launching into the pitch, adapt the middle to who is actually standing there, and land the ask. Then, within about a day, follow up with a short message [referring to something specific you both said](/knowledge/networking/networking-follow-up-email/), while the conversation is recent enough for them to place you. Follow-up gets the least coverage of any part of this topic, which is odd given that the speech exists to start a relationship rather than conclude one. Thirty perfect seconds followed by silence produce the same result as thirty bad ones. ## What an elevator speech is really testing Look back at where those seven steps get difficult. Almost none of it is vocabulary. Step one turns on what somebody else cares about, step three on asking for something, step seven on what you do the next morning. The speech is a small object resting on three larger abilities, and the abilities are what carry into the next situation. **Influence** is the closest match, because an elevator speech is a pitch in miniature and fails the way pitches fail. The preparation that counts is not rehearsal but working out what is in it for the person listening. The delivery keeps it simple and rests on a real example rather than a run of claims. If the full thing you want is not on offer, a small win is the right target — and persisting afterward decides whether the thirty seconds counted for anything. **Communication** is the compression itself. Being brief, being clear and direct, putting the main point first, adapting to the person in front of you: not general virtues here, but the specific edits that take a rambling draft down to 75 sayable words. The half that gets neglected is the receptive half — catching the moment when the other person would rather ask you something than hear your next sentence. **Networking** is the room this happens in. What you are doing at a career fair is making a relevant connection, not closing something, which is why a version aimed at someone with no reason to care lands flat. It also covers what the speech cannot: approaching a stranger with a concrete reason, and following up quickly with a personal detail. The awkwardness most people feel about this is ordinary, and it shrinks with repetition rather than with better wording. The hard part is telling which of the three is holding you back, because from the inside almost everyone diagnoses it as wording. An outside read is more reliable, which is what the free Job Skills Test offers — [which one is weakest](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), set against twelve skills in total, so these three arrive with context rather than in isolation. None of them is a fixed trait, and whichever comes back lowest usually moves fastest once you put attention on it. ## The version of this you already have Some of this probably describes something you can already do. Most people introduce themselves perfectly well when nothing is riding on it — a friend of a friend, a conversation that starts by accident. The ability is generally there. What is missing is the version that holds up when you have thirty seconds and something at stake, and that gap closes through practice rather than by becoming a more outgoing sort of person. You have also read past the examples, which most people do not — the usual approach is to find a script, memorize it, and stop. That counts for something, because the abilities underneath this do not expire. You will introduce yourself at the career fair, then again in your first week on a new team, then again the first time you ask someone senior for something. ## Find out which part to work on first The writing you can now do this evening. The open question is which of the abilities underneath it you can currently rely on. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. It takes about 7 minutes, covers all twelve skills in this framework including the three above, and shows which of yours would make the most difference right now. You can do it on your own, before you have to speak to anyone. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** Free, about 7 minutes, and the result is yours alone. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Two full elevator speech examples, plus the seven steps that turn one into a 30-second introduction that sounds like you instead of a memorized script. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Influence. It also relates to Communication, Networking. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence/elevator-speech-examples/ Preferred summary: "Two full elevator speech examples, plus the seven steps that turn one into a 30-second introduction that sounds like you instead of a memorized script." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.