Most LinkedIn About sections are either empty or read like a CV that got bored halfway through. Both waste the one part of your profile where you actually get to sound like a person.
The About section is up to 2,600 characters of free text under your headline. It is the only place on LinkedIn where you control the voice completely. Used well, it turns a profile that lists jobs into a profile that tells someone why you are worth a message.
What people actually read
LinkedIn shows the first two or three lines of your About section before a "see more" link. Most readers never click it. So those first lines carry the weight of the whole section, and they should not be a job title repeated from your headline.
Open with something concrete: what you do and who you do it for, or a short observation that signals how you think. Save the chronology for the experience section. The About section is for a point of view.
A structure that works
There is no single right format, but this skeleton holds up across most professions:
- A hook — one or two lines that make the reader want the rest. A specific result, a clear statement of who you help, or a genuine opinion about your field.
- What you do now — your current focus, in plain language. Skip the buzzwords.
- Proof — a couple of achievements or a sentence on the kind of problems you have solved. Numbers help.
- A human note — something that is not strictly professional. What you care about, how you work, what you are curious about right now.
- A soft call to action — how and why someone should reach out.
Write it in the first person. "I help" reads as a human; "Jane helps" reads as a press release that nobody asked for.
Examples for different stages
Recent graduate:
I build small web apps and break them on purpose to learn why they failed. Right now I am finishing a computer science degree and freelancing on front-end projects for two local businesses. I am looking for a junior developer role on a team that reviews code carefully and explains the why. If that sounds like your team, say hello.
Mid-career professional:
I have spent eight years turning messy operations into systems people can actually follow. At my last company that meant cutting order-processing errors by half in a year. I care about the boring infrastructure work that makes a team faster without anyone noticing. Open to operations and process roles in companies scaling past their first hundred people.
Career changer:
For six years I taught secondary-school maths. Then I realized the part I loved was designing how information gets explained, so I retrained in UX. My classroom habit of testing an idea on thirty skeptical teenagers turns out to be useful research practice. I am looking for a junior UX role where curiosity counts more than years in the field.
Each one opens with a real sentence, not a label. Each one has a number or a specific detail. And each one ends by telling the reader what to do.
Common mistakes
Leaving it blank. A blank About section reads as a profile its owner does not maintain. Recruiters notice.
Stuffing it with keywords. Keywords matter for search, but a paragraph of them reads as spam. Work the important ones into real sentences instead.
Writing in the third person. Unless you genuinely have a team managing your profile, third person feels off. It creates distance where you want the opposite.
Making it a duplicate of your CV. The experience section already lists your roles. The About section should add the thing a bullet list cannot: voice, motivation, a sense of how you think.
If you are also building a CV from the same LinkedIn profile, a tool like Postulit can handle the structured experience data, which frees you to spend your writing energy on the About section, where it actually moves the needle.
Rewrite it once a year, or whenever your focus shifts. An About section that still describes the job you left two years ago quietly tells everyone you have not looked at your own profile in a while.