LinkedIn headline and About section examples

Your LinkedIn headline is the line under your name. It follows you everywhere on LinkedIn: search results, comments, connection requests and the “people also viewed” lists. The About section is the short text further down your profile. A recruiter who finds you in a search sees the headline first and reads the About section only if the headline made them click.

If you leave the headline alone, LinkedIn fills it with your current job title and employer. That repeats your experience section and says nothing about what you are good at.

Every example below uses a made-up person; swap in your own facts.

The limits

• Headline: up to 220 characters. On a phone, search results cut it after roughly the first line, so put the most important words first.
• About: up to 2,600 characters. Only the first few lines show before “see more”, so the opening has to work on its own.

You do not need to use all of it: 800 to 1,600 characters is enough for most people.

How to write a headline

A headline that works usually has two parts:

1. What you are: your job title, the way people search for it. “Senior Accountant” beats “Numbers Wizard”.
2. What makes you worth a click: your field, two or three skills a recruiter would search for, a certification, or one result.

Separate the parts with a vertical bar or a middle dot. Skip emoji and buzzwords (“passionate”, “results-driven”, “guru”). They take space and no recruiter searches for them.

To pick the skills, open four or five job ads for the role you want next and note the tools and skills that appear in most of them. Those are the words recruiters type into the search box, so the ones you really have belong in your headline.

Three shapes you can fill in:

[Job title] | [two or three skills or tools] | [your field]

[Job title] at [Company] | [what you work on] | [one result or certification]

[Job title] | [two or three skills] | Open to [role] roles in [city or “remote”]

If you are looking for work, you can name the role you want, for example “Data Analyst | SQL · Power BI | Open to junior analyst roles”. Use the Open to Work setting as well (see the checklist at the end). Between jobs, keep your professional title in the headline. “Operations Manager | Warehouse and supply chain | Open to roles in Manchester” gets found in searches; “Unemployed” or “Seeking new opportunities” on their own do not.

Headline examples for 12 jobs

These are written for fictional people. Copy the shape and use your own words.

• Software engineer: Backend Engineer at Northwind Pay | Go · PostgreSQL · Kubernetes | Payment systems
• Product designer: Senior Product Designer | Healthcare apps | Design systems, accessibility and user research
• Nurse: Registered Nurse, Intensive Care | 6 years in adult ICU | ACLS certified
• Accountant: Senior Accountant | Month-end close, IFRS reporting and audit preparation | CPA
• Sales manager: Regional Sales Manager at Acme Tools | B2B industrial sales | Grew the northern region from 12 to 31 dealers
• Teacher: Secondary School Maths Teacher | GCSE and A level | Using data to plan small-group support
• Marketing specialist: Performance Marketing Specialist | Google Ads · Meta Ads · GA4 | E-commerce
• Project manager: IT Project Manager | PMP | ERP rollouts in manufacturing
• Data analyst: Data Analyst | SQL · Python · Power BI | Turning sales data into weekly decisions
• HR specialist: HR Business Partner | Recruitment, onboarding and employee relations for 400+ staff
• Recent graduate: Economics graduate | Excel · SQL · financial modelling | Looking for a junior analyst role
• Career changer: Former teacher moving into UX research | Google UX certificate | Interviews, usability testing

Each one starts with a real job title, follows it with search terms and ends with one specific detail. A number appears only where the person can back it up.

How to write the About section

Write in the first person. On LinkedIn, “I lead a team of five” reads more naturally than “Experienced professional who leads”. A simple structure:

1. Who you are (two sentences). Role, field, years of experience, and where you work now if you want to say it. This is the part people see before “see more”.
2. What you do well. The skills and tools you want to be found for, in a sentence or a short line.
3. Proof. Three or four results, each on its own line starting with a symbol such as “•”. Take them from your resume, ideally the bullets with numbers.
4. What you want next. The role, team or problem you are looking for. Recruiters cannot guess this from your experience.
5. How to reach you. An e-mail address, or an invitation to send a message.

Because only the opening shows before “see more”, test it on its own. Cover everything after the second sentence: if a recruiter would still know your job, your field and roughly how senior you are, the opening works.

Three ways to order these parts work well:

• Story: who you are, what you are good at, then a few results. Good for most people.
• Results first: a one-line introduction, then the results list. Good for sales, operations and other jobs measured in numbers.
• Skills first: introduction, then your tools and certifications. Good for technical roles where recruiters search for keywords.

Weak and strong: two rewrites

Weak: Passionate, results-driven professional with a proven track record of success in dynamic environments. I love challenges and am always looking to learn and grow.

Strong: I’m a payroll specialist with seven years in retail and logistics companies. I run monthly payroll for about 900 employees across three countries and keep it on time and audit ready. Right now I’m looking for a payroll lead role in a company that is growing internationally.

Weak: Experienced software developer. Skilled in many technologies. Team player.

Strong: I’m a backend engineer at Northwind Pay, where I work on the services that move card payments. Most of my work is in Go and PostgreSQL. Last year I led the move of our settlement jobs to a queue-based design, which cut failed nightly runs from a few a month to none since March.

Both strong versions name a job, a field, real tools and at least one result with a number.

Three full About examples

Customer success manager (story)

I’m a customer success manager with five years in B2B software, currently at Lumen Analytics. I look after about 40 mid-sized accounts, from onboarding to renewal.

I’m good at turning customer feedback into product requests that engineers can act on, and at the quarterly reviews where renewals are decided.

A few results:
• Kept gross revenue retention for my accounts at 96% in 2025
• Built the onboarding checklist the team now uses for every new account
• Cut the average time to first value from six weeks to three

Next, I’d like to lead a small customer success team at a product-led company.

You can reach me here or at anna.berg@example.com.

Electrician (results first)

Licensed electrician with nine years in commercial and industrial installations.

• Led the electrical fit-out of a 6,000 m² warehouse, finished two weeks ahead of schedule
• Trained four apprentices who all passed their final exams
• Zero lost-time incidents on my sites in the last five years

I work with low and medium voltage systems, solar panel installations and EV chargers.

Looking for: a site supervisor role in the renewables sector.

Contact: jonas.weber@example.com

Junior data analyst (skills first)

I recently finished a degree in economics and a six-month data internship at a retail chain.

What I work with: SQL · Python (pandas) · Power BI · Excel · basic statistics

During the internship I built the weekly stock report the store managers now use, and cleaned up a sales dataset of 2 million rows so it could feed the forecast model.

I’m looking for a junior analyst role where I can work with business teams on real decisions.

Feel free to send me a message here.

Mistakes to avoid

• Copying your resume summary word for word. LinkedIn is read in a more personal tone; the first person is normal there.
• Writing for everyone. “Open to opportunities in any industry” tells a recruiter nothing. Name the kind of role you want.
• Numbers you cannot defend. A recruiter may ask about any figure in an interview. Use the numbers from your resume, not round ones that sound good.
• Leaving the default headline. “Accountant at Acme” is what LinkedIn writes for you. Add what you are known for.
• Contact details nobody can use. If you want e-mails, write your address in the text; not everyone can see the contact info section.
• A headline and resume that disagree. If your resume says “Project Coordinator” and your headline says “Project Manager”, a recruiter who checks both will ask which is true. Use the same title, or one your resume clearly supports.

Write yours from your resume

If your resume is in AlderCV, open the LinkedIn profile tool from the editor or from the menu of a resume on your dashboard. It drafts several headline options and an About section from your resume: your title, years of experience counted from your dates, skills, certifications and the bullets that contain numbers. You can switch between a professional, warm or concise tone and the three structures above, edit the text in place and copy it into LinkedIn. The character counters warn you before you hit LinkedIn’s limits.

The draft is free and is made on your device. With Pro you can also have AI polish it; figures that are not in your resume are flagged so you can check them.

No resume in AlderCV yet? The free LinkedIn headline generator writes the same drafts from a few details you type, in your browser, without an account.

For the resume side, see resume summary examples, resume action verbs and how to write the skills section.

A short profile checklist

• Photo: a clear, recent photo where your face fills most of the frame.
• Banner: replace the default background image with one that fits your field or employer.
• Featured: pin your best work, such as a portfolio, a case study, an article or a talk.
• Open to Work: if you are looking, turn it on and choose who sees it: all LinkedIn members, or recruiters only.
• Custom URL: change your profile address to something like linkedin.com/in/your-name and put it on your resume.
• Resume: think before you add it to Featured, because anyone who views your profile can download it. Our guide on adding your resume to LinkedIn compares the options.