Write your LinkedIn profile in first person, in plain declarative sentences, with claims carried by evidence instead of adjectives — that combination is what reads as senior. Third person reads as vanity, hype reads as insecurity, and false modesty wastes the reader's time; the confident middle is stating what you did and what happened, then stopping.
The About section is understood by every reader to be written by you, so writing it in third person — Sarah is a transformational leader who — creates an immediate credibility problem: either you hired someone to praise you or you are praising yourself from behind a curtain. Both readings are worse than plain first person. I lead, I built, I ship. The experience section can drop pronouns entirely, resume-style — Led a 9-person platform team — which reads naturally in that context.
First person also forces honesty. It is easy to type visionary about a name in third person and strangely difficult to type I am a visionary. If a sentence embarrasses you in first person, the sentence was the problem, not the pronoun.
The line between confident and arrogant is not about boldness of claims — it is about whether the claim is checkable. I am one of the top growth marketers in fintech is bragging because the reader must take your word for it. I grew a fintech app from 200k to 3M users in two years is confident because the reader can weigh it, question it in an interview, and verify it with references. Big verifiable claims read as strength; big unverifiable claims read as compensation.
This is why adjectives are the enemy of senior tone. Every adjective you attach to yourself — seasoned, dynamic, world-class — is a claim with no evidence attached. Replace each with the fact that made you want the adjective. The reader will supply the adjective themselves, which is the only way it ever counts.
Profiles drift into a strange dialect — leveraging synergies to drive impactful outcomes across the value chain — that no human speaks aloud. It reads as evasive because it is: abstraction is what language does when there is nothing specific to say. The senior register is closer to how you would describe your work to a smart friend in another field. I make sure the trains run on time for 40 warehouse teams is better writing than the same job described in operational-excellence vocabulary.
Two mechanical habits get you most of the way there. Prefer verbs to noun-phrases: improved onboarding, not drove the enhancement of onboarding processes. And read the About aloud once — anywhere you stumble or cringe is a sentence written for an imaginary audience rather than a real reader.
First person for the About section — it is your voice by convention, and third person reads as either self-importance or a ghostwriter. Experience entries can use pronoun-free resume style, which reads naturally there.
Make claims that are specific and checkable, then stop. Numbers, named outcomes, and scope read as confidence because the reader can verify them; superlatives about yourself read as bragging because they cannot. Cut self-applied adjectives and let the facts earn them.
A light, dry line in the About can humanize a profile, especially in creative fields — but it should sit on top of substance, not replace it. Test any joke against the worst-case reader: a conservative hiring manager skimming at speed. If it needs context to land, cut it.
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