Most About section advice gives you opening lines and leaves you with a blank second paragraph. Below are fifteen complete drafts, opening through close, organised by what you want the profile to do. Take the closest one, replace every detail with your own, and delete anything you would not say out loud.
Two structural facts worth knowing. The About section collapses after the first few lines, so the opening decides whether anyone reads the rest. The same applies to anything you post: LinkedIn truncates a post after roughly the first two lines and hides the rest behind “see more”, which makes the hook the only guaranteed-read part of both. If you want opening lines by career stage rather than full drafts, LinkedIn summary examples is a longer list of those.
What a working About section contains
Every draft below follows the same three moves, and it is worth seeing them separated out.
| Part | Job it does | Length |
|---|---|---|
| Opening | Earn the “see more” click with one specific line | 1–2 lines |
| Middle | What you actually work on, with one real example | 2–3 short paragraphs |
| Close | Tell the reader exactly what to do next | 1–2 lines |
If you are hiring for your team
These work because candidates read the hiring manager’s profile before they apply, and honesty about the work filters better than a pitch.
Engineering manager. I manage eight engineers on a payments team, which means I spend most of my week removing obstacles and about an hour writing code, badly.
I hire people who ask what we have already tried. If you are looking at our openings, message me for the unedited version, including the annoying parts.
Head of support. I run a support team of six for a product used mostly by accountants, which means our busiest month is March and we plan the whole year around it.
Most of my job is deciding what not to answer twice. We tag every ticket and fix the product instead of writing another macro, which has kept the team at six while the customer base tripled.
I read every application myself. If support is your career rather than a stop, say so in the first line and I will read the rest carefully.
If you are looking for a job
Naming the role you want, and when you are available, does more work than any summary of your career.
Operations, mid-career. Ten years in operations, and I am strongest in the messy first year of a process, before anyone has agreed what good looks like.
I inherited a returns process that lived in three spreadsheets and one person’s head, and cut the average resolution from eleven days to three. It stayed there after I left.
I am looking for an operations role at a company with a physical product. Available from November, happy to talk before then. Email is on my profile and I reply.
Recently laid off. My role was cut in a restructure in March, along with most of my team. I am saying that plainly because the gap is going to be visible anyway.
I spent six years in demand generation for products with long sales cycles and small budgets.
I am looking for a marketing role somewhere that measures pipeline rather than impressions. I would rather hear about one early than polished.
Early career. I graduated last year and I have spent it doing data work at a small charity, which mostly meant cleaning fifteen years of donation records.
I am looking for a junior analyst role. Not fussy about the industry, very fussy about having someone to learn from.
If you are freelancing or consulting
Clients are deciding whether you are affordable and whether you are the right shape. Tell them both.
Independent designer. I do one thing: redesign checkout and signup flows for small ecommerce brands.
A typical project is four to six weeks and starts with session recordings, not a design tool. The last one removed two form fields and pre-filled the country, and beat the redesign we had planned.
I take three projects a quarter and turn down more than I accept, usually because the problem is not a design problem. Send me the URL and what you think is wrong.
Fractional finance lead. I am the finance person for four companies at once, each of which needs about a day a week and none of which needs a full-time hire yet.
I have room for one more client from January. Rates are day-based and I will quote them on the first call.
If you are changing fields
The reader’s real question is what transfers. Answer it in the second paragraph.
Hospitality to customer success. Twelve years running restaurants, and now I do customer success for a software company. The jobs are closer than they look.
Both are mostly about delivering bad news early and clearly. I made the move eighteen months ago, and what I had to learn was the software, not the customers.
If you are making the same transition, message me. It was harder than it needed to be and I answer everyone who asks.
Teaching to instructional design. I taught secondary school for nine years, which is nine years of finding out in real time which explanations fail.
I am open to short contract work alongside my role, one project at a time. Ask and I will tell you if I have room.
If your profile is a sales tool
Buyers check your profile after the first email. Make it read like a person, not a brochure.
Enterprise account executive. I sell logistics software to companies that already have logistics software, so most of my job is being honest about whether switching is worth it.
If you are evaluating options and want a straight comparison rather than a demo, message me and I will send one.
Agency owner. We are a six-person agency doing paid search for subscription businesses, and we are open about being expensive relative to a freelancer.
We take on one new client a quarter. If you want to see how we would approach yours, ask and I will send our first-month plan template.
If you are a student or new graduate
Projects are evidence. Ambition on its own is not.
Final-year student. I am in my final year of a computer science degree and I spend most of my spare time on a side project that has forty real users.
I am looking for a graduate developer role starting next summer. My code is linked on my profile and I would rather be judged on that than on my grades.
Recent graduate, first role. I finished a six-month marketing internship where my main job was the email programme nobody had touched in two years.
I cut the welcome sequence from seven emails to four and the open rate went up. I do not think that was cleverness. The previous version was long.
I am looking for a junior marketing role from September. Happy to do a task-based interview, I would prefer it.
What to avoid
- “I’m thrilled to announce” and its profile equivalents, such as “passionate about driving results”. It is the most common opener on the platform and it says nothing about you.
- Humblebragging. “Somehow they let me lead this” is a brag that also wastes your opening.
- Gratitude lists of twenty tagged names. Two names and what they did is more convincing.
- Vague adjectives with no example behind them. “Results-driven” is not a fact about anyone.
- Third-person self-description. “Sam is a passionate marketer” reads like a press release someone else wrote.
- Every skill you have ever touched. Thirty listed skills read as none.
- A wall of unbroken prose. It renders badly on phones and gets abandoned.
What to do
Write the sentence you would say if someone at a conference asked what you do. That is your opening, and it is almost never the sentence you would write from a blank box. Add two short paragraphs: what you work on, and one example with a real detail. Close with a plain instruction on how to reach you, then honour it. Break the text into short blocks, since it is read on a phone more often than not, and a LinkedIn line breaker helps when the formatting collapses. The headline does similar work in fewer characters: LinkedIn headline examples covers that.
Keeping the profile and the posting in one place
An About section earns its keep when something drives people to your profile, and that something is usually a post. BulkPublish schedules LinkedIn posts alongside the other platforms with per-channel text, so a long LinkedIn version and a short version elsewhere are queued together rather than written twice. How to schedule LinkedIn posts covers the mechanics.