Your headline is the most-read line you have written this year and probably the least considered. It appears under your name in every search result, every comment, every connection request, every time someone is deciding in half a second whether to click. Most people fill it with their job title and never look at it again.
- The headline field holds 220 characters, but most places show only about the first 60.
- Answer four questions first, then write three versions and pick the one you would click.
- Build the About section from six blocks, with the hook above the fold.
A job title tells a reader which box your employer put you in. It does not tell them who you help, what changes for those people, or why they should believe you. Those three things are what the field is for.
Here is the formula for the headline, the truncation problem almost nobody accounts for, and the six blocks that assemble into an About section people actually finish reading.
The raw material
Four answers first. The headline is assembled, not written.
Staring at the headline field is the reason it ends up as a job title. You are trying to compose and decide at the same time, in a box that is too small for either. So answer these four separately, in plain language, before you write a single version:
- Who you help. Specific enough that someone could be excluded.
- What you help them do. The change, not the activity.
- How you do it differently. The part a competitor could not claim by working harder.
- Your proof. A number, a name, a thing you shipped.
Everything downstream is built from those four answers. If you cannot fill them in, the problem is not your headline, it is that you have not written one sentence that says who you are for yet. Start there and come back.
The cutoff
You have 220 characters. You are judged on the first 60.
This is the part that quietly breaks most good headlines. The field gives you 220 characters, so people write a full, careful, three-clause line, and then LinkedIn truncates it. Under your name in a comment thread, in a search result, in the connection request someone is skimming, only roughly the first 60 characters survive.
Which means a headline that reads beautifully on your profile page can read as nonsense everywhere else. If your proof point is at the end, nobody sees it. If your differentiator is in the third clause, it does not exist.
Write for 60 characters. Use the remaining 160 for the people who clicked.
Front-load the thing you most want a stranger to know. Check it by typing your draft into a comment on someone else's post and looking at what actually shows. Do not publish a headline you have only ever seen on your own profile.
LinkedIn has changed these limits before, and the cutoff varies by screen and surface. Treat 220 and 60 as the figures at the time of writing, and check the headline field in your own editor.
Three versions
Write it three ways, then pick the one you would click.
One draft gives you nothing to compare against, so you keep whichever draft you happened to write. Three gives you a choice.
Read all three out loud. The one you would click on if it belonged to someone else is the one to use. That test is more reliable than your judgement about your own positioning, because it moves you from author to reader.
Six blocks
The About section is a structure, not an essay.
The About section fails differently. People treat it as a biography, open with where they went to school, write five paragraphs in the third person, and lose the reader in the first two lines, which are the only lines LinkedIn shows before the "see more" fold.
Treat it as six blocks instead. Fill each one, in order, and it assembles itself.
This is the only part most readers see. Your positioning sentence belongs here, not your education.
Straight, unhedged, first person.
Name your method. A named approach is repeatable; "I'm passionate about" is not.
Numbers, shipped things, named collaborators. This is the block people skip and the block that converts.
Makes the profile live rather than archival, and gives people a reason to reach out this month.
One. A profile with three asks gets none of them.
Worked examples
Three rewrites.
These are invented, with brackets where your own proof goes. The moves are what matter: who and what in the first sixty characters, proof after the cutoff.
| Before | After | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| Senior Consultant at a consulting firm | I help mid-size manufacturers cut changeover time · [number] plants, [percent] faster | The title became who you help and what changes for them. |
| Passionate educator | Lifelong learner | Dreamer | Teaching teenagers to read data critically · [number] classrooms, [subject] curriculum | Three feelings became one specific thing you do. |
| Freelance designer | Brand identity for founders launching this year · [number] launches, [named result] | A category became a customer and a time frame. |
What goes in the characters after the cutoff.
The reader who clicked wants evidence. One number, one named result, one thing you built. Not a list of values, and not a repeat of what the first sixty characters already said.
Do it this week
Thirty minutes, and the most-read line you own starts working.
Answer the four raw-material questions. Assemble three headline versions. Test the first 60 characters somewhere they truncate. Fill the six About blocks. Paste both in on the same day.
Nobody is going to read your résumé. They are going to read one line under your name and decide. Make that line say something.
Writes The Visionary, field notes from the AI-native frontier. Building in public: practical builds, named methodology, receipts, no fluff.