Verified against Claude · 2026-07-24
Rewrite your LinkedIn About section so it reads as a person, not a resume
Turn disjointed notes or a resume-voice draft into a first-person About section that opens strong before LinkedIn's preview cutoff and reads like it was written by the person, not extracted from a CV, with keywords worked into real sentences instead of bolted onto the end.
The prompt
Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.
CURRENT ABOUT TEXT OR ROUGH NOTES
I have 8 years in B2B marketing. I led demand gen at two startups. I like data-driven growth and building teams.
ROLE AND ACTUAL FOCUS
Head of Growth at a seed-stage fintech, focused on organic and lifecycle
SEARCH KEYWORDS TO INCLUDE
demand generation, B2B SaaS, lifecycle marketing, fintech
WHO IS LIKELY TO READ THIS
Recruiters sourcing growth leads, and founders considering hiring me
WHAT YOU WANT THE READER TO DO NEXT
DM me, or see case studies at example.com/work
CHARACTER LIMIT AND TRUNCATION POINT
The About field has a hard limit of 2,600 characters, but LinkedIn shows only roughly the first 300 characters before a "...see more" cutoff — on the profile itself and, separately, in search-result snippets. That means the section effectively has two audiences: the small number who click to expand, and the much larger number who only ever see the first three sentences.
RULES
1. OPENING (first 2-3 sentences, roughly 300 characters) — must work as a complete, compelling summary entirely on its own, since most readers never see past it. Do not front-load throat-clearing ("I've always been passionate about...") or context that only pays off in a later sentence — assume the reader stops here unless the opening itself earns the click to expand.
2. VOICE — write like the person is talking, first person, not like a resume summarizing them in third person. "Jane is a results-driven professional with 10 years of experience" is exactly the register to avoid; write it the way the person would actually describe their own work to a peer.
3. KEYWORDS — work every term from demand generation, B2B SaaS, lifecycle marketing, fintech naturally into real sentences describing actual work, not as a bolted-on list of skills at the end that reads like a tag cloud.
4. SPECIFICS OVER ABSTRACTIONS — include one or two concrete specifics (a real number, a real project type, a real turning point) rather than relying only on abstractions like "passionate," "dedicated," or "results-driven" that could describe almost anyone in the field.
5. CLOSE WITH A CLEAR ASK — end with one plain sentence stating what you want the reader to do, using DM me, or see case studies at example.com/work if given: connect, reach out about a specific kind of work, or view a portfolio. Don't leave the intended action implicit and hope the reader infers it.
FULL-SECTION STRUCTURE
After the opening 2-3 sentences, use the remaining space — still comfortably under 2,600 characters total — to expand on Head of Growth at a seed-stage fintech, focused on organic and lifecycle with one or two more concrete examples, then land on the closing ask. Do not pad the middle just to use more of the character budget; a shorter, sharper About section outperforms a long one that repeats the opening's point in different words.
OUTPUT
The full rewritten About section, followed by its exact character count and a confirmation it's under 2,600, plus a separate note on the character count of just the opening 2-3 sentences so the truncation-visible portion can be checked on its own.Customize
Optional — swap in your own details for the highlighted parts above.
Why this works
The About field truncates to roughly its first 300 characters in two separate places — the profile view itself and LinkedIn's own search-result snippets — which means the opening sentences aren't just an introduction to the rest of the section, they're effectively the only guaranteed-visible copy the section has for a large share of the people who ever encounter it. An opening spent on throat-clearing burns the section's single highest-leverage space. Writing in first person rather than third-person resume voice matters because LinkedIn is structurally a social feed people scroll through the way they'd read a post, not a document database like a resume PDF. Third-person summary is the fastest tell that a profile was copy-pasted from a CV rather than written for the platform it's actually displayed on, and readers register that mismatch before they process any of the actual content. LinkedIn's People Search indexes About-section text for keyword matching, which is why naturally embedded keywords do double duty here in a way they wouldn't in a resume — a term appearing in a real sentence about actual work both reads naturally to a human and is available to the same search index a recruiter's query hits, whereas a bolted-on skills list at the end satisfies only the second purpose while actively hurting the first. The instruction against padding the middle just to use more of the character budget targets a specific temptation this format creates: because the limit is generous (2,600 characters) relative to what most people actually need to say, there's a pull toward filling the space, but a section that restates its opening point in slightly different words across three more sentences reads as repetitive to the smaller audience who does read past the cutoff, undermining exactly the credibility the opening worked to establish.
Verified against
Claude Sonnet 5 · 2026-07-24
ChatGPT GPT-5.1 · 2026-07-25
Changelog
- 2026-07-25 — Initial publish for the rewritten linkedin category; added the explicit 300-character opening rule and the closing-ask variable after drafts kept saving the actual point for paragraph two and leaving the next step implicit.
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