How to Format Your LinkedIn Profile: Bold, Bullets and Line Breaks That Work

If you open the Edit about box on your LinkedIn profile, you'll notice there's no toolbar: no bold, no italics, no list button. You get 2,600 characters to explain yourself to a hiring manager and a box that works like a text message.

You can see the result on most profiles. The About section is one long paragraph, and the Experience entries are blocks of text pasted from an old resume. People who do find a way to make text bold often use it on their job title, which, as you'll see below, makes them harder for recruiters to find. I build formatting tools for LinkedIn, so I've spent a lot of time testing what these fields accept. This guide goes field by field: what works, how to do it, and what to leave alone.

What formatting works in each LinkedIn profile field #

Every field on a LinkedIn profile stores plain text. Even so, you have three things to work with: line breaks, symbol characters like the • bullet, and Unicode letters that look bold or italic (more on those in a moment). Which of them a field accepts varies, and so does whether using them there is a good idea.

Roughly speaking, the long description fields are where formatting helps a reader. The short identity fields (name, headline, job title, skills) are where LinkedIn's search does its matching, and formatting there mostly hurts you. All the limits are counted live in our LinkedIn character counter if you want to check a draft before pasting it in.

How to bold text in your LinkedIn About section #

The bold text you see on some profiles is made of special characters. Unicode, the standard that defines every character your computer can display, includes whole alphabets of mathematical letters that look bold, italic or monospaced. So 𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱 is spelled with four different characters from the ones in "bold". Since they're ordinary characters as far as LinkedIn is concerned, they survive copy and paste and display everywhere.

There are two ways to get them into the About box.

With a free online formatter

1. Open the LinkedIn text formatter and type or paste your About text.
2. Select the words you want bold, a section label for example, and click Bold.
3. Copy the result.
4. On your profile, click the pencil icon on the About section, paste, and click Save.

It runs in the browser, there's no sign-up, and the live preview shows how the text will look before you paste it anywhere.

Directly inside LinkedIn, with the extension

If you'd rather edit in place, the Post Formatter Chrome extension works inside LinkedIn's Edit about dialog. Select a few words and a small toolbar appears with bold, italic and the other styles, the same one it shows in the post composer. That's handy for profile work in particular, because you tend to tweak the About section a sentence at a time and a round trip to another tab for every change gets tedious.

Whichever route you take, use bold for signposts. Three or four bold labels in a 2,600-character section help someone skimming find the part they care about. If whole sentences are bold, the reader can't tell what matters.

Formatting your LinkedIn headline without hurting it #

The headline is the most visible text you own on LinkedIn. It sits under your name on your profile, in search results, next to your name on every post and comment you write, and in every invitation you send. It is also a single line of 220 characters, with no line breaks.

So headline formatting comes down to separators. A vertical bar or a bullet between the parts turns a run-on sentence into something you can scan:

Senior Product Manager | B2B SaaS & Fintech | Turning messy roadmaps into shipped products

You can make part of a headline bold with Unicode, and you'll see people do it. Here's what goes wrong when they bold the wrong part:

𝗦𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗼𝗿 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗠𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗿 | B2B SaaS & Fintech

It looks sharper, and a recruiter searching for "senior product manager" will not find it in that headline, because the bold version is made of different characters. If you want some emphasis in the headline, give it to the part nobody searches for, the tagline at the end, and keep every title and skill in normal letters. Most strong headlines use no styling at all, just good separators and specific words.

Bullet points and line breaks in About and Experience #

Of the three tools, these two help readability the most, and they have no effect on search.

Bullets are just a character at the start of a line. Type • with Alt+0149 on a Windows number pad or Option+8 on a Mac, or copy one from our LinkedIn symbols page, which also has arrows, check marks and dashes if you want a different marker. LinkedIn keeps the character and the line break after it, so a list stays a list. The bullet points guide covers sub-bullets and numbered lists.

Line breaks are where most profiles go wrong, usually by accident. You write the About section in Google Docs or Word, paste it in, and the blank lines between paragraphs disappear, leaving one block of text. The editor is flattening the document's paragraph formatting on the way in. To fix it, paste first, then read through the text in the editor before saving and press Enter wherever an empty line went missing. If the spacing looks right in the edit box, it will look right on the profile.

A blank line between every two or three sentences is about right. On a phone, a three-line paragraph already fills most of the screen width, so short blocks read far better than they look in a desktop editor.

A LinkedIn About section template with formatting #

Here's a structure that uses everything above in the proportions I'd recommend: plain paragraphs, a handful of bold labels, one bullet list. Swap in your own details.

I help B2B software teams ship the features their customers actually pay for. Eight years in product, the last four leading payments products at a Series C fintech.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗜 𝗱𝗼
I run discovery, write the specs engineers like working from, and keep roadmaps realistic about what will ship this quarter.

𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘀
• Cut checkout drop-off by 18% with a redesigned payment flow
• Launched card issuing in the US and Canada in 7 months
• Grew a product team from 3 to 11 people

𝗪𝗵𝗼 𝗜 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵
Founders and VPs of Product at fintech and SaaS companies between Series A and C.

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵 𝗺𝗲
Message me here or email [email protected].

A few things about it that are deliberate:

• The opening two sentences are plain and carry the keywords (B2B software, product, payments, fintech). LinkedIn shows only the first few lines of your About section before "see more", so those lines have to work as a summary on their own.
• The bold labels are words nobody would search for, so styling them is safe.
• The bullets hold numbers, which is what a skimming reader's eye looks for in a list.
• It ends with a way to contact you. A surprising number of profiles don't say what the reader should do next.

The opening lines matter for the same reason a post's first lines do: they're all most visitors read. The mechanics of that cutoff are in our guide to the see more cutoff; it's written about posts, but the writing advice carries straight over.

The recruiter search problem with styled text #

If you're job hunting, read this section even if you skip the rest. Recruiters find candidates by searching: a job title, a couple of skills, a location, often as a Boolean string in LinkedIn Recruiter. Search matches characters. The word "Python" is six specific characters, and 𝗣𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗻 is six different ones that look similar. You read both as the same word, but the search index treats them as unrelated.

So the rule for a profile is stricter than the rule for posts:

• Job titles, skills, tools, certifications, company names and industries stay in plain text, everywhere on the profile.
• Style only words with no search value: section labels, a tagline, a single number in a results list.
• If a keyword deserves emphasis, emphasize it with position instead. Put it in the first line of the About section or at the start of a bullet, where it gets seen without being styled.

Keep in mind that some people will hear your profile rather than read it. Screen readers deal with these characters poorly, often spelling them out by their Unicode names or skipping them. That's tolerable for a few labels but makes a fully styled paragraph impossible to follow.

Formatting the Experience section #

Each position gets a title (100 characters, keep it plain and use the title people would search for) and a description of up to 2,000 characters that keeps line breaks and bullets.

The format that works is the one resumes settled on long ago: one sentence on what the role was, then three to five bullets on what you achieved, each starting with a verb and ending, where you can, with a number. If you bold anything here, bold the number in your best bullet and leave the rest alone. Copying your resume bullets straight in is fine, as long as you check the spacing after pasting for the reasons above.

While you're in there, read the descriptions on your phone. Plenty of people will open your profile in the app, and a description that looks tidy on a wide monitor can turn into a long scroll of wrapped lines.

Before you hit Save: a quick checklist #

1. Name fields contain only your name, with no symbols or styled letters.
2. Your headline uses separators, and every job title and skill in it is in plain text.
3. The first two lines of About make sense on their own and include your main keywords.
4. About and Experience have a blank line every two or three sentences, checked in the editor after pasting.
5. Bold is limited to labels and the odd number, never a keyword.
6. You've looked at the profile on a phone.

None of this takes long, and a profile that is easy to skim makes a better first impression than one that isn't. The free formatter handles one-off edits, and if you also post on LinkedIn, the Post Formatter extension puts the same styles right inside the post composer and the About editor.