Your headline is not your job title
The most-read line on your profile defaults to something the reader can already see. That is a wasted asset.
Your LinkedIn headline follows your name everywhere: in search results, in comment threads, in the sidebar of somebody else's post, in a recruiter's list of candidates. It is the only line of your profile that most people will ever see.
By default it contains your job title and employer. Both of those already appear directly beneath it. So the line with the widest reach on your entire profile is, out of the box, a duplicate.
What the headline is for
Two jobs at once. It has to be legible to a person scanning a list, and it has to contain the words somebody would type when looking for a person like you. Those goals are compatible if you write plainly and incompatible if you write in slogans.
Senior Manager at Acme Corporation
Supply chain and operations leader · Multi-site distribution, vendor strategy, inventory recovery
The first repeats what is directly below it. The second states what you do and carries the terms someone would actually search.
Three headline patterns that work
- 01Function plus specialism"Finance leader · FP&A, post-acquisition integration, treasury". Clear, searchable, no cleverness required. This is the safest default and works for most people.
- 02Position plus direction"Head of Engineering, scaling platform teams from 20 to 100+". Useful when your trajectory is the most interesting thing about you.
- 03Audience plus outcome"I help regulated lenders pass their first FCA audit". Strong for consultants and anyone whose value is easiest to state in terms of who they serve. Weaker inside large organisations, where it can read as freelance positioning.
The About section, briefly
The headline earns the click; the About section has to survive it. A few things consistently help:
- Write in the first person. Third-person profiles read like a press release about somebody who is not in the room.
- Front-load. Only the first couple of lines show before the reader has to expand it, so put the substance there and the context afterwards.
- Say what you are looking for, if you are looking. Not a plea — a direction. It saves everyone time.
- Use short paragraphs. A dense block of text on a phone screen simply does not get read.
One caution about keywords
Terms matter for search, but a headline stuffed with every variant of your discipline reads as spam to the human who eventually looks at it, and humans make the decisions. Pick the three or four terms you genuinely want to be found for and use them in sentences that a person would be happy to read aloud.