How to write a LinkedIn About section (a four-part structure with examples)

Explaining how you think about your work to someone who is already slightly interested. It is not a biography and not a resume summary. Done well, it tells one kind of person that you understand their problem, and gives them both a reason and a way to start a conversation.

Think about who is actually reading it. Someone who liked a post and clicked your name. A buyer checking you out an hour before a call. A person deciding whether to send you a message they have half-written. They are all asking the same two questions: can this person do the thing, and would I enjoy dealing with them.

A career history answers neither. What answers both is a short, specific piece of writing that shows what you do, how you approach it, and what you are like to talk to.

The first two or three lines, then a see more link that most visitors never click. Everything you need a casual reader to know has to survive inside that opening. Write those lines the way you would write the first line of a post, not the first line of a cover letter.

Which is why the standard opener is so costly. With over eight years of experience across a variety of industries spends the entire visible section saying nothing. So does the childhood story, and so does any sentence beginning with the words my journey.

Open with the specific work instead. I write the emails that consumer brands send between the first order and the second. Someone who does not need that stops reading, which is fine, and someone who does clicks see more, which is the whole point.

A hook that names your niche, a stack that shows what you can do, a passage on how you approach the work, and one clear next step. Four moves in that order, each doing a job the others cannot do, and each of them short.

1. 1.The hook. One or two lines naming exactly what you do and who for. Specific enough that the wrong reader stops here, which is a feature.
2. 2.The stack. What you actually do, grouped so someone can assess you in ten seconds. The tools, the methods, the kinds of problem you take on.
3. 3.The method. How you think about the work and what it produces. This is what separates you from the other twenty people with the same skill list.
4. 4.The next step. One invitation, with a way to act on it. An email address, a link, or a sentence describing what a good first conversation looks like.

The order is not arbitrary. Attention decays down the page, so the part that decides whether someone is in the right place goes first, and the part that only matters to a convinced reader goes last.

Here is the structure filled in twice, once for a freelance specialist and once for a founder. Both are short, both name the person they are for in the first line, and both finish with something a reader can act on the same day.

A freelance data analyst:

• Hook: I help subscription businesses work out why people leave, using the data they already have.
• Stack: SQL and dbt for the modelling, Looker or Metabase for dashboards nobody needs training to read, and enough Python to do the analysis properly. Churn, cohorts, pricing tests, lifetime value.
• Method: Most retention projects end in a dashboard, which is why most of them change nothing. I work backwards from the decision you need to make and leave you with two numbers you can act on rather than forty you can look at. If the answer is that the product is fine and onboarding is broken, I will say so.
• Next step: I take on two projects a quarter. If you have a retention number you cannot explain, send me the shape of the problem and I will tell you whether it is worth paying anyone to look at.

A founder:

• Hook: I run a small software company that handles bookings and rebooking for physiotherapy clinics, which is a much stranger market than it sounds.
• The work: Around four hundred clinics use it. Before this I spent six years building rota systems for hospitals, which is where the idea came from and also why I knew what not to build.
• Method: Clinics do not have an operations team. Every feature has to work for a receptionist on a busy Monday morning or it does not ship, and that constraint has killed more of our ideas than any competitor has. I write here about running a small software company in a narrow market, including the parts that go badly.
• Next step: If you run a clinic and rebooking is the thing you keep losing money on, the demo is on our site. If you are building something similar, my inbox is open and I will tell you what I would do differently.

Notice what is missing from both: adjectives about themselves. The reader decides whether you are good. Your only job is to hand them the evidence.

Six things, and they are all versions of the same mistake: writing about yourself rather than to a reader. Fix these before you spend an hour polishing individual sentences, because no amount of wording rescues the wrong shape.

• Third person. Sarah is a passionate marketer reads like an obituary, unless you are genuinely a public figure with someone else maintaining the page.
• The origin story opening. Nobody has decided to care yet, so the childhood dream costs you the only lines that get seen.
• One unbroken block of text. Two or three sentence paragraphs with space between them, so it survives a phone screen.
• Buzzword stacking. Strategic, innovative, results-driven, cross-functional. Those words are wallpaper, and readers have learned to skip them.
• No next step. If a reader finishes convinced and there is nothing to do, you have built a museum exhibit.
• Text that was generated and never edited. It has a recognisable tone, and the people you most want to impress are the people most likely to spot it.

If you are not sure which of these you are guilty of, paste the draft into the readability checker and read what comes back. Dense, long-sentence writing is the usual symptom, and it is easy to fix once you can see it.

First person, almost always. It is the one part of the profile allowed to sound like a voice, and reading it should feel like the person talking. Third person only makes sense when the profile is genuinely maintained by someone other than you.

The test is to read it out loud. If you would not say the sentence to a colleague while making coffee, cut it or rewrite it until you would. Everything that survives that test tends to be the writing people remember.

The field holds 2,600 characters and you should use around a third of it. The best About sections land somewhere between 800 and 1,200 characters, because the reader is deciding whether to bother with you, not studying you for an exam.

Length is usually a symptom rather than a problem. A section that runs to the character limit is nearly always trying to speak to three different audiences at once: buyers, recruiters, and peers. Pick the one you actually want and write to them. The others will still understand it.

Start from your own words, not from a generic draft. That is the real distinction. A draft written in nobody's voice takes an hour to polish and still lands as competent and forgettable, because you spent the hour sanding down someone else's phrasing instead of finding your own.

So say it out loud first. Record a voice note explaining what you do to a friend, or write three ugly sentences in a notes app. That raw version already contains the phrasing, the rhythm, and the specifics that make an About section sound like a person, and it is far easier to shape than to invent.

This is the part innernote was built for. It learns how you actually write, from your own posts and a short conversation, and then drafts in that voice, so what comes back reads as written rather than generated. You get the first draft without inheriting a stranger's tone, and you keep the reputation the profile is supposed to be building. See how it works, or start free and paste in your rough version.

Before it goes live, run the final text through the AI text cleaner so nothing in it reads as generated, and check the headline above it with the headline formula so the two say the same thing. The rest of the profile is covered in the full profile guide.