LinkedIn Headline and About Section: What to Write

The headline goes everywhere

Most people write their headline once, on the day they change jobs, and never think about it again. It is the wrong piece of text to neglect.

Your headline travels with your name into every place your profile appears. Search results. The comment you left on someone's post. A connection request. A message to a recruiter. The suggested-people panel. In almost all of those, the headline is the only thing about you the reader sees before deciding whether to click.

The about section is the opposite. It sits behind a click, then gets collapsed after roughly two lines, and most visitors scroll past it to your experience without expanding.

Those two facts should drive how you write each one. The headline needs to work in isolation, in a single line, seen by people who were not looking for you. The about section needs to earn its expansion in its first sentence and reward it in the next paragraph.

What a headline needs to carry

Three things, and there is room for all three in 220 characters.

The role, in the words people search. This is what makes you findable, and it is where internal job titles cause damage. If your company calls you a Growth Ninja or a Member of Technical Staff, nobody is searching for that. Write the industry-standard title, and keep the internal one on your experience entry where it belongs.

Two or three skill terms. The specific things you do, which is what recruiters actually filter on. Not adjectives about yourself, the nouns of your work.

A differentiator. One phrase that separates you from the several thousand people with the same title. A specialism, a sector, a kind of company, a result you are known for. This is what makes a headline yours rather than a category label.

Some patterns that work:

• "Senior Product Manager | B2B SaaS, pricing and packaging | Previously scaled two products past 10M ARR"
• "Registered Nurse, ICU | Critical care and trauma | Epic superuser | Toronto"
• "Data Analyst | SQL, dbt, experimentation | Turning marketing spend questions into answers"
• "Operations Manager | Warehouse and fulfilment | Cut order cycle time 60% across three sites"
• "Marketing Manager | Demand generation for technical products | Content, SEO, lifecycle"

The pipe-separated format is conventional on LinkedIn and it reads cleanly at small sizes. Whether you use pipes or another separator matters less than fitting the three elements in.

One clear takeaway: a headline containing only a job title wastes the most-seen line on your profile.

Headlines for particular situations

The standard pattern breaks in a few common cases, and each has a reasonable answer.

Currently unemployed. Write the role you do, not your employment status. "Financial Analyst | FP&A, forecasting, SaaS metrics | Open to new roles" is far stronger than "Seeking opportunities", which describes your situation rather than your capability and matches no search.

Changing fields. Point at the destination while keeping the credible part of the origin. "Moving into UX research | 6 years in clinical psychology | Interviewing, synthesis, behavioural analysis" is honest and searchable in both directions.

Freelance or consulting. Name what you do for whom. "Fractional CFO for Series A to B startups" beats "Consultant" by a distance, because the second matches nothing anyone is looking for.

Early career. Lead with the field and the specific skills rather than the level. Recent graduate is a status, not a search term, and it invites the reader to discount you before reading anything else.

Between two things. Pick the one you want more of. A headline that hedges across two unrelated directions reads as uncertainty and matches neither search well.

The about section, written for two lines

Assume the reader sees the first two lines and decides. That single constraint fixes most about sections, because it removes the warm-up paragraph almost everyone writes.

Open with what you do and the strongest evidence you have. "I run demand generation for technical products. Over the last four years I have taken two companies from nothing to a pipeline that funded their Series B." Nobody needs a sentence about your passion for problem-solving before that.

Then three or four short paragraphs. What you actually do day to day, in concrete terms. The specific kinds of problems you are good at. One or two results with numbers. Something human at the end, briefly, because a profile with nothing personal reads like a resume that has been pasted in.

Write in the first person. Third-person summaries read as dated and slightly formal in a way LinkedIn stopped rewarding years ago.

Keep paragraphs to two or three lines. The section is read on a phone more often than not, and a solid block of text is skipped regardless of what it says.

Close with what you want. If you are looking, say so plainly and say what for. If you are not looking but open to the right thing, say that. A reader who has got to the end of your about section is the most engaged visitor you will get, and leaving them without a next step wastes it.

An about section template

Adapt this rather than filling it in literally. The bracketed parts carry the value.

"I [what you do] for [who you do it for]. [Strongest single piece of evidence, with a number.]

Most of my work is [the two or three activities that make up your actual week]. I am at my most useful when [the specific situation where you are better than average], usually because [the reason, in one clause].

Recently I [one concrete thing, with the outcome]. Before that, [one line of relevant history that explains how you got here].

[One sentence that is a person speaking rather than a professional summary.]

[What you are looking for, or how to reach you.]"

The template is short deliberately. Long about sections do not get read more thoroughly than short ones; they get abandoned at the same point with more words above the fold.

The parts around them

A good headline sitting above a neglected profile still underperforms, and three things fix most of that.

Your experience entries need content, not just titles and dates. Two or three lines each, with the same evidence you would put on a resume. Profiles with empty experience entries rank poorly and read as abandoned.

Your skills list feeds LinkedIn's own matching, so fill it with the terms in your headline and keep the top three in order of what you want to be found for.

Your photo and banner do more than people credit. A profile with no photo gets materially fewer profile views, and the banner is free space that most people leave as the default gradient.

If you are actively looking, the open-to-work setting has a recruiters-only mode that keeps you out of recruiter filters' blind spot without the public green banner. Our post on being found by recruiters covers how those searches work in more detail, and our resume builder can supply the evidence lines your experience entries are probably missing.

Common mistakes in both sections

The same handful of habits show up on most profiles and each one costs something specific.

Emoji as structure. A rocket and three checkmarks in a headline compress badly at small sizes and read differently across audiences. One is survivable, four is noise.

Buzzword strings. Results-driven, dynamic, passionate, thought leader. None are searched for, none are verifiable, and together they occupy the space that skill terms should hold.

Writing for a promotion you have not had. Inflating a title in the headline while the experience section says something else creates a mismatch a recruiter notices immediately.

Copying your resume summary in. Resume summaries are written to be scanned in six seconds by someone who already has your document open. LinkedIn's about section is read by someone deciding whether you are worth a message, which is a different question.

Leaving it stale. An about section describing a job you left two years ago is worse than none, because it signals the profile is not maintained and nothing on it can be trusted as current.

Fixing all five takes about half an hour, and it is the highest-return half hour available on the platform.

How often to revisit it

Twice a year is enough when you are not looking, plus immediately when anything changes.

The trigger points are obvious once listed: a new role, a promotion, a shift in what you want to do next, a new specialism, a significant result worth naming. Each of those makes the current version slightly wrong, and slightly wrong compounds.

If you are actively searching, revisit the headline whenever you notice the job titles in postings drifting away from the one you have written. Job titles move faster than people update their profiles, and being described in last year's vocabulary quietly removes you from this year's searches.

Questions people ask

How long should a LinkedIn headline be?

Use most of the 220 characters. There is room for your role, two or three skill terms and a differentiator, and a bare job title wastes the space.

Should my headline say I am open to work?

It can, at the end, after the role and skills. Leading with your job-seeking status describes your situation rather than what you do.

How long should the about section be?

Three or four short paragraphs. It is truncated after about two lines, so the opening sentence carries most of the weight.

First person or third person?

First person. Third-person summaries read as dated on LinkedIn and create distance between you and the reader.

Does the headline affect search results?

Yes. It is weighted in LinkedIn's own matching, which is why using the industry-standard job title rather than an internal one matters.

Related reading

• Skills Gap Analysis: Working Out What to Learn Next
• Cover Letter Format: Layout, Length and Where It Goes