The LinkedIn About section: 5 formulas that work

A hiring manager I know told me she opens roughly 40 LinkedIn profiles a day when she's running a search. She reads the first two lines of the About section. Maybe. If those two lines are good, she reads more. If they're not, she closes the tab and moves to the next candidate.

Forty profiles a day. Two lines each. That's the game.

And yet most About sections start like this:

"A results-driven, passionate professional with over 10 years of cross-functional experience driving innovative solutions at scale across global teams…"

Nobody reads past the comma. Definitely not past "cross-functional."

The About section is 2,600 characters of real estate that almost everyone fills with LinkedIn-flavored corporate mush. It's the biggest unforced error on the platform. Here are five formulas that actually work — pick one, write it in an hour, move on.

Formula 1: The opening story

Start with a specific moment. Not a generalization, not a summary — a scene.

"In 2019 I inherited a three-person design team and a product that had a 4% trial-to-paid conversion rate. Two years later the team was twelve people and the rate was 17%. The thing that worked wasn't what I thought would work. Here's what I do now."

The opening sentence drags the reader into a concrete situation. Once they're in, you've earned the next three paragraphs. Use that runway to talk about what you learned, what you'd do for the next company, and what kind of work you're looking for.

This is my favorite formula for people with 5+ years of experience. It trades buzzwords for a specific memory, and specific memories read.

Formula 2: The "what I do, who it's for, why it works"

Three short paragraphs, one per question.

"I design onboarding flows for B2B SaaS companies. The audience is usually a head of product who knows their activation rate is terrible but can't get the eng team to prioritize fixing it.

What I do: audit the current flow, interview 10 recent signups, rebuild it in Figma with annotations the eng team can actually ship from. Last four engagements, activation went up by 18–41%.

Why it works: I'm a designer who used to do customer support. Most onboarding fails because the person designing it never had to explain the product to a confused user on chat at 11pm. I did."

This works especially well for freelancers, consultants, and anyone job-hunting into a specialized role. It's also useful if you want inbound — the clearer you are about what you do and who it's for, the more often people message you with exactly that.

Formula 3: The career arc

Useful when your career has taken an unusual path and you want to make it legible.

Start with where you are now. Then trace back — not chronologically, but thematically.

"Today I lead growth at a Series B dev tools company. But I got here through a weirder route than most: journalism, then a failed startup, then four years at a big agency, then two years freelancing. The through-line is that I've always been good at figuring out why people use things — or don't.

The journalism taught me to interview. The failed startup taught me to ship. The agency taught me how big companies actually buy software. The freelancing taught me to price. Now I put all of that into campaigns that move the revenue number."

This disarms the most common objection about nonlinear careers — that they're unfocused — by reframing the path as a coherent strategy. If you've pivoted once or twice, use this.

Formula 4: The proof stack

For senior operators and engineers who'd rather let the work speak.

Five bullets. No adjectives. Just outcomes.

• Led the migration of a 12-service monolith to a microservices architecture, cutting p99 latency from 2.3s to 410ms.
• Hired and managed 14 engineers across two continents; 11 are still with the company three years later.
• Open-sourced the internal tool we used for feature flagging — 3,400 GitHub stars, adopted by six companies I know of.
• Wrote the technical spec for our payments system; it's processed €1.2B without a production incident in 18 months.
• Most recent performance review: top 5% company-wide, two years running.

Then a short paragraph at the bottom: what you're looking for next. That's it. Numbers do the work.

Formula 5: The direct ask

For when you're actively looking and want to stop being subtle about it.

"I'm looking for a Senior Product Manager role at a Series A/B B2B company, ideally in dev tools or fintech, remote-first or in Berlin.

Here's what I bring: — 7 years of product, last 4 at [company] where I owned the developer experience surface. — Comfortable writing SQL, reading PRs, and actually running customer interviews. — Built and shipped [specific thing] used by ~40k developers.

If you're hiring for something like this, send me a message. If you know someone who is, I'd owe you a coffee."

This is the one that most actively-looking people should be using and almost nobody does. It tells a recruiter exactly what to do next, which is the whole point of being on LinkedIn when you need a job.

The rules that apply to all five

A few things are true regardless of which formula you pick.

Write in first person. Third-person About sections ("Jane is a seasoned…") are a relic. They read like you paid someone to write them, because you did.

Short paragraphs. Two or three sentences, max. On mobile, anything longer becomes a gray wall and gets skipped.

One number per paragraph, minimum. A specific number — 17%, €1.2B, 14 engineers — is worth more than any adjective.

Cut the first draft by 40%. Always. Every About section I've ever rewritten got better the moment I deleted half of it.

The takeaway

Nobody reads About sections that sound like About sections. They read the ones that sound like a human wrote them in the first ten minutes after they decided to be honest about what they do.

Pick a formula. Write it tonight. If you're actively looking for work — and you're tired of applying into the void — a real About section plus a well-built CV (we can help with the second part at WunderJob) is the boring combination that actually moves the needle.