What makes a great LinkedIn About section?
Your LinkedIn About section is prime real estate. It appears near the top of your profile, it's the first thing a recruiter or hiring manager reads after your headline, and it's indexed by LinkedIn's own search algorithm. Most people either skip it entirely or paste in their CV objective — both are missed opportunities.
A strong About section does three things at once: it tells your professional story, includes the keywords recruiters search for, and gives the reader a reason to keep scrolling. Here's what separates a profile that gets ignored from one that gets a message.
Write in first person, not third
Third-person summaries ("John is a seasoned product manager…") read like someone else wrote it for you — because they did, usually from an old bio. First-person voice ("I help SaaS companies…") feels like a real conversation and immediately builds credibility. LinkedIn's own data shows first-person profiles get meaningfully higher engagement. Every summary this tool generates uses first-person by default.
Lead with your value, not your title
Most summaries open with "I'm a Senior Software Engineer with 8 years of experience." That's your headline restated. Instead, open with what you do for people: "I build payment infrastructure that processes millions of transactions without a single outage." That's specific, outcome-focused, and impossible to skim past.
Include the keywords recruiters search for
LinkedIn search works like any other search engine. Recruiters type terms like "growth marketing manager B2B SaaS" or "senior data engineer Spark Databricks" and filter by location. If those words don't appear in your profile, you won't appear in their results. Your About section is the best place to include 4–6 keywords that match the roles you're targeting — worked in naturally, not stuffed in a list.
Keep it to 150–400 characters for maximum impact
LinkedIn truncates your About section after roughly 300 characters on desktop and even fewer on mobile, showing a "see more" link. That means the first two to three sentences carry almost all the weight. Everything critical — who you are, what you do, and who you serve — needs to land before that cutoff. Longer summaries aren't bad, but they won't get read unless the opener is strong enough to earn the click.
End with a call to action or signal of openness
A small but effective move: finish with something that tells the reader what to do next. "Open to product roles at Series B–D companies" signals intent to recruiters without you having to broadcast it everywhere. "Reach me at…" removes friction for inbound. Even "Always happy to connect with fellow growth practitioners" works. It turns a static profile element into a two-way invitation.