When Your LinkedIn About Reads Like a Hostage Negotiator Wrote It
"Results-driven professional passionate about driving results." Blink twice if you wrote this under duress.
Executive Emily clicked publish on her LinkedIn About section and felt genuinely proud of it. Results-driven professional passionate about driving results. She thought it captured her personal brand. It did, in a way. The brand was that she had been hostage to corporate language for so long she could no longer remember how regular humans talk. Across town, a stranger on a couch saw her profile, smirked, swiped past, then opened his own profile and watched his expression collapse when he realized his About section said the same thing in a slightly different order.
The LinkedIn About section is where careers go to be described by their ghost. Everyone uses the same words. Strategic, innovative, passionate, driving. The vocabulary has been so thoroughly worn down that it no longer points at anything. It is professional placeholder text. When recruiters scroll, they are not really reading, they are pattern-matching, and the pattern they keep finding is skip, same, skip, same.
The fix is not to be cleverer. The fix is to be specific. One real sentence about the actual humans you serve, one concrete number, one unexpected word a recruiter and your mother would both recognize. The Cheetah Elevator Pitch frees the hostage and fires the negotiator, because the only About section worth writing is one a stranger could read out loud at a dinner party without flinching.