LinkedIn has become the default background check for hiring managers. Before they read your resume, they look at your profile. Here is a step-by-step guide to making sure what they find works in your favour.
Most people treat the headline as a formality — job title, company, done. That is a wasted opportunity. Your headline appears in search results, sidebar suggestions, and connection requests. It is the most-read text on your profile.
A strong headline includes three elements: your function (what you do), your specialty (the specific thing you are best at), and one proof point (a number, credential, or recognisable brand that makes the claim credible).
Example
"Senior Product Manager | B2B SaaS | 0→$12M ARR | Ex-Atlassian"
The About section is your only chance for an unprompted narrative. Recruiters read the first two lines before deciding whether to expand it. Most profiles open with "I am a passionate professional with X years of experience." That tells recruiters nothing they could not already see.
Instead, open with your strongest professional outcome. Something like: "I have shipped 4 products in the last 3 years that grew revenue by a combined $8M." That is the kind of opening that earns the click to read more.
The rest of the About section should cover: what you are best at, what kinds of problems you solve, and what you are looking for next. Keep it under 300 words. First person, active voice.
The most common mistake in LinkedIn experience sections is writing what you were responsible for instead of what you actually delivered. Responsibilities tell recruiters what your job was. Results tell them how good you were at it.
The formula for a strong experience bullet: action verb + what you did + the measurable result. For example: "Redesigned the onboarding flow, cutting time-to-activation by 34% and reducing first-week churn from 22% to 14%."
If you do not have numbers for a specific result, use scale or scope instead — team size, budget managed, number of stakeholders, geographic reach. Any concrete detail is better than none.
LinkedIn's search algorithm weighs skills as a ranking signal. But the value of a skill keyword depends on whether it matches what your target employers are searching for. Go through your current skills list and remove anything that no longer reflects what you want to be hired for.
Add the specific tools, frameworks, and methodologies that appear in job descriptions for your target roles. Include both broad terms ("product management") and specific ones ("Jira", "OKR planning", "B2B SaaS").
LinkedIn surfaces profiles in search results partly based on completeness. Missing sections — no profile photo, no location, fewer than 5 skills, no education entry — lower your ranking. They also signal a profile that has not been maintained, which some recruiters interpret as low engagement.
Check: Do you have a current-looking photo? A banner image? At least 3 experience entries? Education? Your location? Featured section with at least one item? These take 20 minutes to fill and have a measurable effect.
It is hard to evaluate your own profile objectively. You know too much context. A useful approach is to ask someone who does not know your work to read your profile and describe what they think you do. If their description does not match your goal, your profile is not clear enough.
An AI analysis cuts through the self-assessment problem. ProfileFix scores your profile across five sections and generates the actual rewrites — you do not have to guess what "better" looks like. The free teaser shows your score and top weaknesses; the full report gives you the complete output to work from.
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Get a section-by-section score, three headline options, and a rewritten About section — all based on your actual profile text. Free teaser, then €4.90 for the full report.
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