Say what you do, who you do it for, and give one piece of proof. You have 220 characters and roughly the first 70 are what most people actually see, so put the useful part first. Job titles alone waste the space, because your title is already listed directly underneath.
The headline is the most-read line on your profile and the most wasted. It follows you into every search result, every comment you leave, every connection request. It is doing work whether you wrote it deliberately or not.
What is the actual limit?
220 characters, and far less than that in practice.
Checking on the day I wrote this, the sources agree on 220 for the desktop headline, raised from 120 in late 2024. Where they stop agreeing is truncation: the point at which LinkedIn cuts your headline off varies by surface, and the commonly quoted figure is around 70 characters in previews.
I would not treat 70 as exact. I would treat it as a warning that the back half of your headline is decoration and the front half is the message.
Write the first 70 characters as though they are the whole thing. If they work alone, the rest is a bonus.
What is the formula?
Three parts, in this order.
- What you do, in words a customer would use rather than words your industry uses
- Who you do it for, because specificity is what makes someone recognize themselves
- Proof, one concrete thing that would be awkward to claim falsely
Most headlines have the first part, occasionally have the second, and almost never have the third. The third is what separates a description from a reason to keep reading.
Proof does not mean a boast. A number, a named specialism, a length of time, a recognizable client type. Something checkable.
What does that look like in practice?
| Instead of | Try |
|---|---|
| Marketing Manager | Marketing Manager, helping SaaS teams turn trials into paid, 12 years in B2B |
| Freelance Designer | Brand designer for independent restaurants, 40+ menus and identities since 2019 |
| Realtor | Helping first-time buyers in Jacksonville, 90+ families moved in last year |
| Business Coach | Coach for agency owners past their first hire, ex-agency operator myself |
| CPA | CPA for construction and trades, specializing in multi-state payroll |
| Social Media Manager | Social media for multi-location restaurant groups, 30 locations and counting |
Notice what changed. The left column describes a job. The right column describes a person a specific someone should talk to, and gives them a reason to believe it.
Notice also that none of the right column is clever. Clever headlines get skimmed. Specific headlines get read.
What about symbols and separators?
Use plain punctuation. Avoid styled Unicode characters, and this is the one place I will be blunt about it.
Separators like a vertical bar, a middle dot or a bullet are ordinary punctuation. They cost nothing and they genuinely help a long headline scan. Use them freely.
Styled characters are different. The bold and script letterforms that people paste into bios are not formatting, they are substitute characters that happen to look like letters. In a bio flourish that is harmless. In a headline it is expensive, for two reasons.
Recruiters and buyers search LinkedIn by keyword, and search matches the characters you typed. A headline reading "๐๐๐ซ๐ค๐๐ญ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐๐๐ง๐๐ ๐๐ซ" does not contain the string "Marketing Manager" as far as the search index is concerned. You have styled your way out of the results.
Screen readers hit the same wall, announcing the formal Unicode name of each character or skipping them. Your headline follows you everywhere, so that penalty follows you everywhere too.
The rule I use: decoration is fine where nothing needs to match it, and costly where something does. A headline is the most matched text on your entire profile. I set out the full version of this trade-off in the accessibility explainer.
If you do want a styled flourish somewhere on your profile, put it in the About section, where nothing depends on a machine reading it. Social Fonts is free if you want to try one.
How specific is too specific?
Narrower than feels comfortable, and the discomfort is the point.
The fear is that naming a niche turns away everyone outside it. In practice a vague headline turns away everyone, because nobody recognizes themselves in it. "Helping businesses grow" is addressed to no one.
If you genuinely serve several audiences, pick the one you most want more of. The headline is not a contract. It is a filter, and a filter that catches everything is not filtering.
What should you leave out?
Four things, all of them common.
Your job title on its own. It already appears directly under the headline. Repeating it spends your most valuable characters on information the reader already has.
Emoji strings as decoration. One, used deliberately, can work. Four in a row reads as noise and pushes the words that matter past the truncation point.
Buzzwords with no content. Visionary, guru, ninja, thought leader. These describe how you would like to be perceived rather than what you do, and readers discount them automatically.
"Open to work" as the whole headline. Use the banner feature for that, which is what it exists for, and keep the headline doing its job.
What I see on profiles I look at
Two patterns, both fixable in ten minutes.
The first is the headline that was never written. It is whatever LinkedIn auto-filled when the person added their current role, sometimes years ago, occasionally naming a company they have since left. It is not bad so much as absent.
The second is the over-decorated headline: styled fonts, several emoji, three separators, and by the time you reach the end you could not say what the person does. Effort was spent, but on the wrong layer.
The headlines that work are almost boring to look at and extremely clear to read.
What to do on Monday
Open your profile and read only the first 70 characters of your headline. If a stranger could not tell what you do and who you do it for from that fragment alone, rewrite it front to back.
Then add one piece of proof. A number, a specialism, a length of time. Something a competitor could not copy into their own headline truthfully.
Check it on your phone afterwards, since that is where most people will see it.
FAQ
What makes a good LinkedIn headline? What you do, who you do it for, and one piece of proof, with the important part in the first 70 characters. A job title alone wastes the space, because your title already appears directly beneath the headline.
How long can a LinkedIn headline be? 220 characters on desktop, raised from 120 in late 2024. Truncation varies by surface and previews commonly cut around 70 characters, so treat the opening as the real headline.
Should I use fancy fonts in my LinkedIn headline? No. Styled Unicode characters are not formatting, they are different characters, so keyword search will not match them and screen readers cannot read them reliably. Plain separators like a bar or a dot are fine. Save styled text for the About section.
Should I put emoji in my LinkedIn headline? One, if it earns its place. Strings of them push your actual words past the truncation point, which costs you the only part most people read.
Should my headline just be my job title? No, because LinkedIn already displays your title under your name. Use the headline to say who you help and why you are worth a reply.
About the author
Adam Palmer is President of Inertia Digital Marketing, the agency behind Social Fonts. He has spent 15 years running paid and organic campaigns for clients ranging from single-location small businesses to national franchise networks, and has managed over $50 million in paid digital spend.