When you are tasked with creating the questions on a professional profile, there are several suggestions outside of not trying to collect personal or dating profile type questions!

Optimal Profile Methodology, It's all in the Euphemism

Euphemisms help keep self-identification fun, non-threatening and expressive. Language selections should inspire, amuse and connect members.

In practice, always use slang, or "insider terms". Use Euphemisms instead of explicit, real-world relationships or generic expressions. As an imaginary example, a Fishing industry community made up of Workers, Salesmen and Executives might list Member Types of Shrimp, Shark, Dolphin maybe with a "choice of decent" like Flounder.

The idea being that everyone in the community is delighted to find the Member Type they know fits their part in it.

Some Best Practices:

Setting the language used in the community is creative and fun, use best practices and think outside the box and results will be informative and engaging.

As a rule, each profile question Title should be short, often two or three words max. A Question Title might sometimes be interpreted differently unexpected ways. As an example, the question: "Living In" was intended to capture keywords like "City, State" - but some members responded with "State of denial" or "State of waiting". These responses showed unexpected creative personality, they were expressive and fun to read.

Another good example might be "Languages Spoken" in a community with mostly international members. That question binds members together, it let's them know something about each other. It is expressive, it can bolster the authors 'merit' and it is interesting to read - it even provides a good conversation ice-breaker inviting more profile comments. etc. Some questions are simply of greater value and effect than others.