Write your LinkedIn About section in first person, open with a hook that survives the 300-character "see more" fold, and run it 150-300 words through four blocks: hook, story, what you do now, how to reach you. Below are six full examples — founder, job seeker, salesperson, freelancer, career changer, student — each annotated.
Only the first 300 characters show
On desktop, LinkedIn truncates the About section around the 300-character mark and hides everything else behind "see more." On mobile you get less. Most visitors never click. So an opener like "Experienced professional with a demonstrated history of..." spends the only guaranteed real estate on words that describe no one in particular. Treat your first two sentences as the ad and everything after the fold as the landing page.
First person, always
The About section is the one place on LinkedIn that is unmistakably you talking. Third person — "Rachel is a results-driven leader" — reads like a press release nobody asked for. "I" does the job the section exists to do: it makes the reader believe that messaging you would get a reply. Every example below uses it.
Three hooks that survive the fold
- The problem you solve. "Restaurant managers lose six hours a week to schedules that break by Tuesday." Anyone holding that problem keeps reading.
- The belief. "I think a sales call should feel like a working session." A stance filters for your people and politely loses everyone else.
- The origin line. "The first supply chain I ever ran belonged to a food bank." Specific, human, impossible to confuse with anyone else's profile.
The through-line: four blocks in order
| Block | Job it does | Length |
|---|
| Hook | Survives the fold, earns the click | 1-2 sentences |
| Story | Makes the hook credible — why you | 3-5 sentences |
| What you do now | Who you help, in searchable terms | 2-4 sentences |
| How to reach you | The ask: DM, email, book, apply | 1-2 sentences |
Aim for 150 to 300 words. The field allows 2,600 characters, but nobody owes you a scroll; the strongest profiles say one thing well and stop.
Keywords without the keyword dump
Recruiters search LinkedIn like a database, and the About section is indexed. The terms you want to be found for have to appear here — inside working sentences. "Six years as a supply chain analyst" is readable to a human and findable by search, which is the whole trick. What fails is the tag cloud ("Skills: leadership | strategy | innovation"): search already reads your Skills section, and humans read it as filler.
The founder
Restaurant managers lose six hours a week to schedules that fall apart by Tuesday. I watched my parents fight that battle at their diner for twenty years — paper grids, crossed-out names, panicked Sunday-night calls. In 2022 I built the thing I wish they'd had: Quartershift, scheduling software for independent restaurants that rebuilds the week automatically when someone calls out. About 400 restaurants run on it now, and I still take support calls on Fridays, because that's where the roadmap comes from. I write here about scheduling, small-business software, and the unglamorous parts of bootstrapping. If your managers still schedule in spreadsheets, my DMs are open.
Problem hook, an origin story that doubles as proof of obsession, keywords ("scheduling software," "independent restaurants") living inside real sentences, and an ask narrow enough to answer.
The job seeker
The first supply chain I ever ran belonged to a food bank: 40 pallets a week, no margin for error, volunteers instead of staff. That job installed the habit I've kept through six years as a supply chain analyst — assume the spreadsheet is wrong until two sources agree. At Norvale Foods, the inventory checks I built cut stockouts 22% in a year. I'm looking for a senior analyst role at a company that moves physical goods and takes its data seriously. Recruiters: my email is at the top of this profile, and I reply within a day.
The origin line makes an unglamorous specialty memorable, one number does the proving, and the closing block tells recruiters exactly what to do — the sentence most job seekers forget. It's the first-person cousin of a strong resume summary.
The salesperson
I think a sales call should feel like a working session, not a performance. I'm an enterprise account executive at Corvex Freight, where I help operations leaders at mid-size shippers get trucks off the dock faster — my last three customers cut detention fees by six figures. Before software, I dispatched trucks for four years, so I know what 5 a.m. at the yard feels like. That's why my demos start with your dock map, not my slides. If loading schedules are stealing your week, message me. Worst case, you leave with two ideas you can use without buying anything.
A belief hook that filters for buyers tired of being pitched, a past life competitors can't copy, and an ask that costs the reader nothing.
The freelancer
Most B2B blogs sound like the same committee wrote all of them. I'm a freelance content writer for logistics and fintech companies, and my job is making technical subjects sound like a person who's done the work — because I have: five years as a freight broker before I switched to writing. Clients such as Pallet & Pine and Ledgerly keep me on retainer for the posts their in-house teams never get to. I take on two new clients a quarter, and the booking link is in my featured section.
Names a shared enemy (committee prose), stakes a niche, and lets scarcity — two clients a quarter — do the persuading quietly.
The career changer
After nine years as an ICU nurse, I couldn't stop asking one question: why does hospital software fight the people using it? That question rerouted my career. I retrained in UX research — a certificate, 300 classroom hours, and three usability studies run in live clinical settings — and I bring the one thing bootcamps can't teach: I was the user. I'm looking for a UX research role in health tech, ideally on products nurses touch every shift. If your team builds for clinicians, I'd love to compare notes. My DMs are open.
The question-as-hook explains the pivot in one line, and "I was the user" turns the previous career into the differentiator instead of the detour.
The student
I'm a third-year environmental engineering student at Ridgeline State who spends weekends knee-deep in stormwater — literally. Our student chapter runs creek monitoring for two townships; I manage the sampling schedule and the dataset (140 samples so far, all public). I'm looking for a summer 2027 internship in water resources or site remediation, and I'm the kind of intern who volunteers for the boring dataset. If your firm hires interns, I'd appreciate ten minutes of advice — a real offer, feel free to hold me to it.
Specifics ("knee-deep," "140 samples") outwork every buzzword a student could reach for, and asking for advice is the right-sized ask before you have a pitch.
Write yours
Hook that survives 300 characters, story only you can tell, present-tense keywords, one ask. Draft it in first person, read it aloud, cut a third. If the blank box is the obstacle, the free LinkedIn About section generator turns five questions into a working draft you can edit into your own voice. Then zoom out: the About section converts visitors, but your photo, banner, and headline decide who visits — the full LinkedIn profile optimization guide covers those in order, and the headline gets a formula of its own.
