Your LinkedIn Headline and About Section: What Senior Leaders Get Wrong

I reviewed a senior leader’s LinkedIn profile recently and could see within seconds why recruiters were scrolling past it. Her headline said one word and a company name. Her About section was three lines written in the third-person, the kind of thing that reads like it was copied from a corporate bio years ago and never touched again. She had a strong career and a profile that gave away none of it. The two parts of LinkedIn that do the most work were doing nothing.

The headline and the About section are the most read and most wasted parts of a senior professional’s profile. They are what a recruiter sees first, what appears in search results, and what decides whether anyone reads further. Get them right and your profile starts working for you. Leave them as most people do and even a strong career sits invisible.

The headline is not your job title

The most common mistake is treating the headline as a label. People put their current title and employer, and stop. “Chief Financial Officer at Company X.” It is accurate, and it is a wasted opportunity, because it tells the reader nothing they could not guess and it does little for how you are found. Two things matter about the headline. It is prime real estate for the keywords recruiters search, and it is the one line that frames who you are before anyone clicks.

This connects directly to how recruiters search LinkedIn before roles are advertised. They search on terms and titles, and your headline is one of the most heavily weighted places those terms can sit. If your headline is just one job title, you are missing the chance to appear in searches for the range of things you actually do. A stronger headline does two jobs at once. It includes the terms that matter for being found, and it signals your value. Something like “CFO and Finance Leader. Taking finance teams beyond reporting into commercial decision-making. Growth, transformation and capital.” That carries searchable terms and tells the reader what you are about in a single line. It is not stuffed with keywords for their own sake, but it is far richer than a title.

Choose keywords that match the target

Keywords should come from the roles you want, not only from the language used inside your current company. Review several credible role briefs and note the titles, capability areas, industries and business situations that recur.

For a senior finance leader, that may include CFO, Finance Director, Head of Finance, commercial finance, transformation, governance, FP&A, M&A, cash, performance or board reporting. The right terms depend on the target and should only be used when they are true.

Do not turn the headline into a crowded search string. Prioritise the titles and value areas most likely to matter. The About and Experience sections can carry the wider set of relevant terms naturally.

Search language helps you appear. Clear positioning gives the person who finds you a reason to continue.

The About section is your argument, not your biography

The second mistake is the About section. Senior leaders tend to make one of two errors here. Either they leave it almost empty, a few lines that say nothing, or they fill it with stiff third-person corporate prose that reads like a press release. Both waste the most valuable block of writing space on your profile. The About section is where you make your case in your own voice. It works best written in the first-person, the way you would actually talk about your work, because LinkedIn is a human platform and the third-person reads as distant and dated.

It should open with something real, the same principle as the executive summary at the top of your resume, and then make a clear case for the value you bring. Think of it as answering a few questions for the reader. Who are you at a professional level? What kind of value do you create and for what kind of business? What is the evidence? And what are you about, the thread that runs through your work? A reader who finishes your About section should be able to describe you in a sentence. Most LinkedIn About sections leave them unable to describe the person at all.

What stronger writing looks like

A stronger headline usually combines target role language, functional value and the areas a recruiter is likely to search. It should not become a list of every capability you have, but it should give the market more than an internal title.

For example, ‘Chief Financial Officer | Commercial Finance | Growth, Transformation and Governance’ gives the reader clear search terms. A value-led variation might add a short statement such as ‘Helping executive teams improve cash, performance and decision visibility.’ The right balance depends on the person and the roles being targeted.

The About section then develops the case. Open with the level at which you operate and the type of value you create. Use the middle paragraphs to provide evidence, including the environments, business problems and outcomes that define your work. Close with the direction or themes you want the market to associate with you.

Avoid copying the executive summary word for word. LinkedIn gives you more room and a more conversational setting. The profile can show more of your perspective and professional identity while still carrying the same positioning as the resume.

Write it for two readers

Your headline and About section have to work for two audiences at once. The first is LinkedIn’s search, which decides whether you appear when a recruiter looks for someone like you. The second is the human who clicks through and decides in seconds whether you are worth their time. Both matter, and they pull in slightly different directions, which is why this is harder than it looks. The search side wants the right terms present, the titles and skills a recruiter would type. The human side wants something that reads naturally and makes a case, not a list of keywords. The skill is doing both at once, weaving the terms that matter into writing that still sounds like a real, credible senior person. This balance is at the centre of optimising your LinkedIn profile for executive recruiters, and it is where most profiles fall down, landing as either invisible or robotic.

Keep it current and active

One more thing that quietly matters. A headline and About section that have not been touched in years signal a profile that is dormant, and a dormant profile suggests someone disengaged. Keeping these sections current, reflecting where you are now and where you are heading, signals that you are present and in the game. For experienced professionals especially, that currency does useful work, quietly answering any question about whether you have kept pace.

Current does not mean rewriting the profile every month. It means that the role, scope, keywords and direction still reflect the professional you are now. A significant promotion, transformation, board appointment or change in target is a reason to revisit the top sections.

Start at the top

If your whole LinkedIn profile needs work, the headline and About section are where to start, because they carry the most weight for the least effort. They are read first, they drive search, and they frame everything else. A strong career with a weak headline and an empty About section is a profile that hides its owner. The same career with both done well is a profile that finds and convinces the right people.

The rest of the profile has to back it up

A strong headline and About section get you read, but they set up a promise the rest of your profile has to keep. If your opening makes a compelling case and then the experience section underneath is a thin list of job titles with no substance, the reader feels the drop. The whole profile should carry the same standard, with each role framed around what you delivered, not just where you sat. The experience section is where many senior profiles fall away. People put real effort into the top, then paste in bare role titles and dates below. But a recruiter who is convinced by your headline will scroll down to check the evidence, and that is where they decide whether to reach out. Give your recent roles the same care as your summary, with a few clear lines on scope and impact under each, and the profile holds together.

It is also worth making sure the profile agrees with your resume. A recruiter often has both in front of them, and inconsistencies between the two, different dates, different titles, a story that does not match, raise a quiet doubt. The two documents do not need to be identical, but they should tell the same story about the same person. When your headline, your About section, your experience and your resume all point the same way, you become easy to trust, and trust is what turns a profile view into a conversation.

The senior leader whose profile I reviewed rewrote her headline to carry both her value and the terms recruiters search, and replaced her three dead lines with a first-person About section that actually made her case. Within weeks she was getting the kind of profile views and approaches her career had always warranted. Nothing about her experience changed. The parts of her profile that do the most work finally started doing it.

Use the words your readers actually use

A practical tip that lifts both the headline and the About section. Use the language your market uses, not internal jargon or invented title variations. Recruiters search on the terms that are common in your field, and decision makers think in those terms too. So if the market calls the role a CFO, use CFO, even if your official title is something more creative. If a particular type of experience is described a certain way in job briefs, mirror that wording. This is not keyword stuffing. It is making sure the words on your profile match the words in the searches and the briefs that matter to you. Profiles full of bespoke, internal language quietly fail, because they do not match what anyone is actually looking for. The fix is simple. Look at how the roles you want are described, note the recurring terms, and make sure the real ones appear naturally in your headline and About section. You become findable in the language your readers already speak.

If your headline and About section need a rewrite, you can see how I approach executive LinkedIn profile writing.

If your headline is only a job title and your About section says very little, book a complimentary Clarity Session and we will identify what those two sections need to say for the roles you want.