What should a LinkedIn About section include for a job seeker?

Four things, in order: who you are and what you do in plain words, two or three specific accomplishments you can prove, what you are looking for next, and a simple way to reach you. Written in first person, it should sound like you introducing yourself to a recruiter, not a brochure describing a product.

How long should the About section be?

Roughly 3 to 5 short paragraphs, around 100 to 250 words. LinkedIn truncates the section after about the first three lines, so your opening sentence has to earn the click on see more. Longer is not better; recruiters skim, and a tight section that leads with your strongest concrete fact outperforms an essay.

Should the About section be in first or third person?

First person. Third person reads as distant and slightly odd on a personal profile, since everyone knows you wrote it yourself. First person also makes honesty easier to check: if a sentence feels wrong to say out loud as I did this, that is a sign the claim is inflated and needs cutting or correcting.

What words should you avoid in a LinkedIn About section?

The buzzwords that appear on millions of profiles and carry no information: results-driven, passionate, strategic thinker, proven track record, dynamic, synergy. Replace each with the concrete fact that made you want the word. Instead of results-driven, state the result: I cut our onboarding time from three weeks to one.

Should your About section match your resume?

They should tell the same true story in different registers: the resume is the formal record, the About section is the spoken version. The facts, titles, and dates must agree, because recruiters check both. Running the free Bounce scan at careerbounce.io first shows which accomplishments the hiring bots actually read from your resume, and those verified lines are exactly what your About section should lead with.

What Should Your LinkedIn About Section Say When You're Job Hunting?

The About box might be the worst blank page in the entire job search. Your resume at least has rules. This thing just sits there asking you to summarize your professional existence in a way that is confident but not arrogant, personal but not oversharing, and somehow different from the four million other profiles that call themselves "results-driven professionals."

Here is the way out: stop trying to write something impressive and write something true, in order, in your own voice. This guide gives you a plain-language formula, worked examples, the words to ban, and a single test that keeps the whole thing honest.

What the About section is actually for

Before the formula, get the reader straight in your mind, because everything follows from it.

When a recruiter lands on your profile, they arrive with a question: is this person a plausible fit for my role, and what is the story here? Your headline and experience entries answer "what." The About section is the only place on the profile that answers the story: who you are, how the pieces connect, and what you want next, in your own voice.

Three implications:

It is skimmed, not studied. Recruiters give it seconds. Your strongest concrete fact goes first, not fourth.
The first three lines are the whole ad. LinkedIn truncates the section behind a "see more" link after roughly three lines. Most visitors never click. Write your opening sentence knowing it may be the only one read.
It is the spoken register. The resume is your formal record; About is you talking. First person, plain words, contractions welcome. Third-person About sections ("Sandra is a seasoned executive...") read as strange on a page everyone knows you wrote.

The formula: four moves, in order

Move 1: Who you are and what you do, in words a neighbor would understand.

One or two sentences, no title-soup. "I run payroll and benefits for a 300-person manufacturing company" beats "Seasoned HR operations professional leveraging cross-functional expertise." If your job title is obscure, translate it: say what you actually make happen.

Move 2: Two or three things you actually did, with the real numbers you have.

This is the core, and it is built only from verifiable facts:

"Over the last four years I cut our monthly close from ten days to six."
"I trained eleven new support reps, and nine are still on the team."
"I wrote the onboarding guide my department still uses."

No number? A concrete fact still works: scale ("a caseload of about 40 clients"), duration ("every release for three years"), or a named artifact ("the audit checklist we now use company-wide"). What does not work is the adjective with no fact under it.

Move 3: What you are looking for.

One or two sentences, specific enough to act on: "I am looking for payroll manager or senior payroll roles at mid-size companies, remote or near Columbus." Vague openness ("exploring new opportunities") gives a recruiter nothing to match you against. Naming your target also lets you naturally include the words recruiters search for, which is the same logic that governs your headline and the rest of recruiter-search optimization.

Move 4: How to reach you.

"The fastest way to reach me is a message here" or an email if you are comfortable listing one. Small, but it converts interest into contact.

Put together, a complete About section runs three to five short paragraphs, somewhere around 100 to 250 words. Here is the formula worked end to end:

I run payroll and benefits for a 300-person manufacturing company, which means every second Friday, 300 families get paid correctly and on time.

Over six years I have taken our payroll error rate to near zero, led our switch to ADP Workforce Now, and built the compliance calendar our whole HR team works from. Before payroll, I spent three years in accounts payable, which is where I got obsessive about details that move money.

I am looking for payroll manager roles at mid-size companies, remote or near Columbus.

The fastest way to reach me is a message here.

Nothing in it is clever. Everything in it is checkable. That is the standard.

The words to leave out (and what to put there instead)

Certain words appear on so many millions of profiles that they have become invisible. Worse, they are all conclusions, and conclusions are the reader's job, not yours. State the evidence and let the recruiter conclude.

"Results-driven" → state a result: "I cut onboarding time from three weeks to one."
"Passionate" → show the behavior: "I have taught our internal Excel course for three years because I genuinely enjoy it."
"Proven track record" → give the proof: "Four product launches, all on time."
"Strategic thinker" → describe the decision: "I made the case to drop our two smallest product lines, which freed the budget for the one that grew."
"Dynamic," "synergy," "go-getter," "guru," "ninja" → nothing. Delete and move on.

The pattern: every buzzword is a compressed claim. Decompress it into the fact that made you reach for the word. If there is no fact underneath, the word was a lie wearing a suit, and cutting it just made your profile more honest.

The read-it-out-loud test

Here is the single quality check that catches everything else, and it takes two minutes.

Read your About section out loud, slowly, and imagine saying each sentence to a recruiter's face in an interview. For every line, ask: could I say this, hold eye contact, and answer a follow-up question about it?

"I led the migration to NetSuite." Could you walk them through it, what went wrong, what you would do differently? If yes, it stays.
"I am a visionary leader who transforms organizations." Would you say that sentence to a human being at conversational distance? You would not. Cut it.
"I increased efficiency by 40%." Can you explain what was measured and how? If the number is real, keep it and be ready. If you inherited it from a template or a hazy memory, it goes, or gets corrected to what you can defend.

This test works because the About section, like everything else in your search, eventually gets tested in a room. Interviewers pull up your profile. The version of you on screen and the version in the chair must be the same person, because the gap between them is where interviews collapse. A profile you can say out loud is a profile you can defend, and defensibility, not polish, is what actually survives a hiring process.

The same standard applies one section down: your experience entries should be the conversational retelling of your resume bullets, not a copy-paste and not an upgrade. That craft is covered in writing your Experience section without copy-pasting your resume, and the consistency question, how closely profile and resume must agree, in should your LinkedIn match your resume.

Lead with what the bots already verified

One last move that makes the whole formula easier, and puts your effort in the right order.

Your About section and your resume should be built from the same small set of true accomplishments. The resume is where those accomplishments face their harshest reader: applicant tracking software that extracts your titles, dates, and achievements into a database, imperfectly. So find out what actually survives that extraction, and lead your About section with those lines.

Run the free scan at careerbounce.io. It shows you exactly what hiring software reads from your resume, what parsed cleanly, what got scrambled, what vanished. It runs entirely on your device; your resume never leaves your computer. The accomplishments that come through intact are your verified, machine-readable best material, and they are exactly what Move 2 of your About formula should feature. One set of true facts, told formally in the resume and conversationally in the About box, consistent everywhere a recruiter looks.

No profile section can promise you interviews, and this one will not either. But an About section that sounds like you, claims only what you did, and survives being read aloud to a stranger is one you never have to be nervous about. Open the box and write the true version. It is easier than the impressive version, and it works better.