How Not to Write a Linkedin Bio

I got a connection request that stank of AI. Here's the teardown.

I was halfway through my second (or third?) coffee on Tuesday morning when it landed. A connection request from a complete stranger, the kind that made me laugh out loud at my desk and then quietly mourn the slow death of LinkedIn as a place where humans talk to humans.

For context it was a content SEO specialist's bio. Now, bearing in mind this is the single highest-stakes piece of writing they'll ever publish. It's the shop window. If they can't be bothered to write it themselves, or worse, can't tell that it reads like a robot in a cheap suit, they are absolutely not the person you'd pay to write yours.

OK, in fairness, I do read every connection request twice, because writing this stuff for a living has turned me into a bit of a snob about it. Most people would have clicked accept and moved on. I sighed, closed the request, and opened a new doc.

I won't name them. That isn't the point. The point is that whoever wrote that profile, or whichever tool wrote it for them, made every classic mistake in the same forty seconds of scrolling. So instead of writing another generic "tips for your LinkedIn bio" post, I'm going to walk you through the profile the way I walk through profiles for clients. Top to bottom. One element at a time. The same teardown I'd run if you paid me to look at yours.

Four things were wrong, and they're pretty much the same four things I see on most profiles I look at.

Problem one: the headline could have belonged to anyone

The headline was a string of nouns separated by pipe characters. Job title. Vague descriptor. Industry. Catch-all phrase about delivering value. You could have lifted that headline off forty thousand other profiles and nobody would have noticed.

A LinkedIn headline has one job. It tells the visitor what you do and who you do it for, in the language they'd use to describe their own problem. That's the whole brief. The reason most headlines fail is that the writer is too busy trying to sound impressive to remember they're writing for a stranger who has never heard of them. The visitor doesn't care about your title. They care whether you're the person who can fix the thing currently keeping them awake at night.

If your headline could be cut and pasted onto a competitor's profile and still make sense, it isn't doing its job. Rewrite it.

Problem two: the banner was fighting the headline

This was the bit that made me actually laugh. The headline was trying to sell them as a multi-discipline operator with several services. The banner, in big bold letters, was selling exactly one of those services (SEO), and ignoring the rest entirely. Two parts of the same profile, ten centimetres apart, telling the visitor two completely different stories about what this person actually does.

I see this constantly, and it's almost always the same cause. The banner gets designed once and then forgotten. The headline gets tinkered with every six months as the offer evolves. Nobody ever sits down and reads the two side by side as a single first impression, which is what they actually are.

If your headline says one thing and your banner says another, the visitor doesn't sit there and patiently work out which version is real. They lose interest in both. You get about three seconds before the jury moves on to the next defendant, and a profile fighting with itself burns most of those three seconds before the trial even starts.

The fix is twenty minutes of work. Read your headline out loud. Read your banner out loud. If they're not telling the same story, change one of them.

Problem three: the banner had no contact prompt

This one is just waste. The banner was a perfectly nice graphic with no website, no email, no anything. Just decoration.

A lot of people don't realise that LinkedIn buries your website link. It sits in a contact panel that visitors have to actively click into, and the vast majority never do. The banner is genuinely the only place on your entire profile where a URL is guaranteed to be seen by every visitor, every time. Leaving it blank is like running a billboard with the phone number missing.

Tuck the URL in the bottom corner, small and quiet and out of the way, but make sure it's there at all. That single change is usually worth more than rewriting the whole bio.

Problem four: the about section was vocabulary salad

Then came the about section. Passionate about delivering value to stakeholders. Driving impactful outcomes across cross-functional teams. Committed to leveraging synergies in a fast-paced environment. You know the vocabulary already. You've seen it a thousand times this month alone.

That is the fingerprint of a large language model left on factory defaults. Anyone who actually wrote their own bio would write it the way they speak. They'd talk about who they help and what they fix in the language they'd use down the pub. The moment you spot one of those tells, your trust in everything else on the page evaporates. The qualifications start to look invented. The endorsements start to look bought. The whole profile collapses under its own weight.

If you're going to use AI to draft a bio, and most people will because that ship has long since sailed, at least edit it like you mean it. Strip every word you wouldn't say at a dinner party without people quietly excusing themselves to fetch another drink. Read the thing out loud. If you wince, your visitors will too.

And worst of all, after five sentences of buzzwords, I still had no idea what kind of business they served, what problem they solved, or what would change for me if I hired them. The whole bio was about them. Their experience. Their passion. Their commitment to delivering excellence in a fast-paced industry, or whatever the phrase was that made me close the tab.

A working about section answers three questions in roughly this order. Who do you help? What do you fix? What changes for them when you do? That's the whole job. Anything beyond those three answers is decoration, and decoration is what makes most LinkedIn profiles feel like polite obituaries.

The fix is much shorter than the problem

A profile that earns its place is rarely longer than fifty words of actual bio. The headline tells me who you serve and what you fix in plain language. The banner says the same thing in the same tone, with your URL tucked in the corner. The about section answers the three questions and then stops. None of it sounds like a corporate press release. None of it uses words you wouldn't say out loud. None of it leaves the visitor wondering what you actually do.

If your own profile has been sitting there untouched for a while and you suspect it might be quietly doing more harm than good, run the same teardown on yourself. Read your headline. Read your banner. Read your about section. Ask whether all three are telling the same story, in plain language, about who you help and what you fix. If you can't answer that in one clean sentence, neither can your visitors, and that's the gap that costs you connections you'd actually want.

If you'd like an outside pair of eyes on yours, that happens to be exactly the kind of gap we fill.