What should your LinkedIn profile say when you are job hunting?

Your LinkedIn headline should say what you do and who for, not repeat your job title. The first two lines of About are what shows before "see more", so put the answer there. Experience entries are not a resume paste. Keyword-stuffing does not work, and a complete profile does nothing if nobody has a reason to open it.

• The headline travels with your name into search results, comments and connection requests, so it is the only field that must work out of context
• The first two lines of About are the visible part before the truncation; everything after is read by people who already chose to continue
• Titles, employers and dates must match the resume exactly, because recruiters open both and disagreement is checkable in seconds
• "Open to work" set to recruiters only is a filtered signal; the public green frame is visible to everyone who sees your name
• Skills are what search filters run against, so list what you would defend rather than everything you have touched
• The photo matters more than the banner: no photo reads as an abandoned account, and a designed banner changes nothing

What should the headline actually say?​

What you do, and who you do it for. This is the field most people set once, at their first job, and never revisit — leaving it to read "Senior Software Engineer at Acme", a sentence answering a question nobody asked.

Compare "Backend engineer — payments and billing systems for B2B SaaS". Same person, and the second version answers the only thing a stranger wants to know before deciding whether to click. Add proof if you have a short piece of it: a scale, a domain, a specialism.

The reason to spend real time on the two lines that travel with your name is that the headline does not stay on your profile. It sits under your name in search results, beside every comment you leave, and on every connection request you send — the only part of your profile that has to make sense to someone who has not opened it.

Keyword-stuffing does not work, and it is the most common failure. "Data Analyst | SQL | Python | Tableau | Power BI | Team Player | Open to Opportunities" is unreadable to a person and adds nothing a recruiter's search does not already take from your skills and experience sections. There is usually one term people in your field search by, and that one belongs in the headline once, in words, inside a sentence.

An AI assistant is useful for generating options to react to, which is a different job from writing the thing:

Here is my current LinkedIn headline: [paste it]
Here is my resume: [paste the full resume]
Here are three job postings I would apply to today: [paste all three]

Write eight alternative headlines. Rules:
- each names what I do and who I do it for, in that order
- each uses wording that appears in at least one of the three postings
- no pipe-separated keyword lists, no "results-driven", no "passionate about"
- at most one credential or number per option
- vary the angle: specialism, industry, outcome, tooling

Then pick the closest one and rewrite it yourself. Generated headlines converge on the same few constructions, and if four people in your field run that prompt, they get one voice four times.

What goes in the first two lines of About?​

The answer to "what do you do and what are you looking for", in plain sentences. About is a long field with a short visible window: it is truncated behind a "see more" control, so anything past the first couple of lines is read by someone who already chose to invest.

Line one is what you do and the kind of problem you work on. Line two is the strongest piece of checkable evidence you have — a system, a number, a scope. After that, the story and a closing line on what you want next. First person throughout; a profile in the third person reads like someone else maintains it.

"Results-driven professional with a proven track record of leveraging cross-functional synergies" is the sentence to find and delete. It describes nobody, and it is the default output of both nervous human writing and unguided AI drafting. The resume-side version of that problem is worked through in the summary of qualifications.

Write the About section for my LinkedIn profile.

My resume: [paste the full resume]
The kind of role I want next: [two sentences, in your own words]
Three things I want to be known for: [list them]
The two achievements I would defend in an interview: [with numbers]

Rules:
- first person, plain language, no buzzwords
- the first two sentences must work alone, because the rest is hidden
  behind "see more"
- sentence two contains one of my achievements, with its number
- 150-200 words total, in four short paragraphs
- close with one line on what I am looking for
- do not describe me with adjectives; describe what I did

The caveat matters more here because the field is longer: generated profile copy converges. Ask for an About section and you get a competent, rhythmically identical paragraph set that a hundred other people in your field also received. Use the draft for structure, then replace every sentence that could appear on someone else's profile. The parts a model cannot produce — the project only you worked on, the number you can defend, the reason you changed fields — are the parts doing the work, the division of labour set out in using ChatGPT for a cover letter without it sounding like ChatGPT.

Why shouldn't the experience section be a copy of your resume?​

Because a recruiter reads both, and identical text means the second one told them nothing. Your resume is tailored per posting and your profile cannot be, so the profile sits at the level of the role rather than of one job description. It also has no page limit, which is not a licence to paste everything but does let you add the sentence a resume always cuts: what the company does, how big the team was, what you inherited. What must stay identical is the factual spine — titles, employers and dates — the subject of the resume-agreement section further down.

What do skills, the photo and the banner actually do?​

Skills are structured data rather than prose, which makes them the part of your profile search filters can act on. Keep the list to things you would be comfortable being asked about, in roughly the order a posting in your field lists them; the same judgement as how many skills to list on a resume.

The photo is worth ten minutes: recent, well lit, face cropped close, background not competing. Having no photo is what costs you something real, because a profile without one reads as abandoned. The banner does not change whether anyone contacts you — set it if you have a portfolio URL worth reading, ignore it otherwise.

"Open to work" is the one setting here that needs a decision, and it comes in two versions: recruiters-only is a filtered signal shown inside recruiter tooling, while the public green frame attaches to your name everywhere it appears, so colleagues and clients see it beside every comment you leave. Recruiters-only is the reasonable default, and if you are currently employed the risk in either version is a discretion question rather than a profile question — how to look for a job while you still have one works through what the setting does and does not hide.

Does your profile agree with your resume?​

Open them side by side and check three things: every job title, every employer name, every date. Disagreement here is the one failure in this post a stranger can prove. A resume showing a role your profile omits, or an end date differing by six months, does not read as a formatting slip — it reads as carelessness or concealment.

The awkward case is real: internal titles that mean nothing outside the company. The answer is not to invent one. Put the official title in the experience entry, where it is a matter of record, and the market-legible description of the work in the headline and the entry's first line, where you are describing rather than asserting.

FluxResume's side of this is the resume, not the profile. Documents live in the Documents hub, scoped to a Resume Profile, so the version you compare against is whichever profile is active — worth knowing before concluding a role is missing. For a second pass on one entry's wording, AI Chat holds a resume as context and will critique it. FluxResume also publishes a LinkedIn Profile Evaluator; no documentation page describes what it scores, so this post will not tell you what to expect from it.

And the limit that undercuts the whole exercise: a finished profile is a page, and a page does nothing on its own. Nobody opens it without a reason — a message you sent, an application you submitted, a referral, a comment on something they wrote. Those reasons come from what professional networking actually involves, and what turns up when someone searches your name is the subject of building a personal brand without posting every day. A good profile makes that effort land. It does not replace it.

Common questions​

How long should the About section be?​

Around 150 to 200 words in short paragraphs, with the first two sentences carrying the answer. Longer is not penalised, but everything past the truncation is optional reading, so a 600-word About is mostly writing for yourself. If you have more to say, the experience entries are the better home, because they are attached to the specific role the reader is asking about.

Should my headline name the job I want rather than the one I have?​

Yes, when the work you already do is recognisable as that job to the person hiring for it. "Engineer building the analytics tooling product teams use" is a true description of a current job and also the headline a product hiring manager reads as relevant, so nothing is being claimed that the experience section cannot support. No, when the target role is work you have not done: a headline asserting a title your history does not back gets caught by the first person who scrolls down, and "Moving into product management" describes your plans rather than answering what you do.

Do recruiters actually read the About section?​

Some do and some skim straight to experience, and there is no public figure on the split you can check, so treat any percentage you see as unsourced. What is knowable is the mechanism: About sits directly under your name and headline, and its first two lines display without a click. Those two lines are the highest-traffic writing on the page whether or not the rest gets read.