How recruiters actually read your LinkedIn

Open your own LinkedIn right now. Not to edit it. Just look at it the way someone would who has never met you, has 200 tabs open, and is trying to get through a list before lunch.

That is the actual test. Not whether your profile is complete. Whether a stranger who owes you nothing finds a reason to keep going.

Most profiles do not give them one. They are complete and they are empty at the same time. Every field filled in, nothing on the page that would make anyone stop.

I said in the resume post that LinkedIn is its own beast and I would do it separately. This is that. If you are an engineer, your GitHub is the other half and it gets read by a different person, later, for different reasons.

Quick context on me

I have been a hiring manager and recruiter for over five years, mostly in tech, and I have hired people into Google, Meta, Apple, a lot of the big places. I have reviewed hundreds of thousands of applications and manually read over 100,000 resumes.

Which means I have done the thing I am about to describe thousands of times. Opened a profile, scanned it, and decided in a few seconds whether to keep going. I am not guessing at what the other side does. I am telling you what I did all day.

What actually happens when someone opens you

Nobody reads your profile. They scan it in a fixed order, and at every step there is a version of you that gets the tab closed.

Look at where that ends. The whole thing is a funnel toward one click, and the click is the only step that turns a scan into a conversation. Everything above it is just earning the right to be clicked.

Most people have built a funnel with nothing at the bottom of it.

LinkedIn, top to bottom

The photo

A face, cropped tight, decent light. That is the entire requirement and it takes ten minutes with a phone and a window.

What does not work: the cropped group photo where your friend's shoulder is still in frame, the one from four years and one haircut ago, sunglasses, a wedding, anything where I cannot tell which person is you. Your photo renders at about 48 pixels in a search result. If your face does not survive that, the photo is doing nothing.

The banner

The default gradient is the single most wasted space on the internet. It is free real estate, everyone leaves it blank, and you can beat most of your competition in about five minutes.

Put one line on it. What you do, and where the work lives. That is it. Not a quote. Not a stock photo of a city skyline you have never been to.

The headline

This is the highest leverage line you own, because it follows you everywhere. Search results, comments, connection requests, the little preview when someone hovers your name. It is the one piece of you that shows up in rooms you are not in.

And almost everybody spends it on their job title, which LinkedIn already displays right underneath. You just paid for the same information twice.

Same rule as the resume. The actual thing, and what changed.

Notice none of those are clever. Clever is not the goal. Specific is the goal.

The About section

LinkedIn cuts this off after about two lines and puts a "see more" link under it. Almost nobody clicks it.

So whatever is below that fold does not exist. Write the two lines that do exist and stop worrying about the rest. Same three lines as your resume summary: what you do, what you have built, what you are looking for.

If your first sentence contains the word passionate, delete the sentence. Everyone can tell it means nothing.

Experience

People fill this in with their job description. The literal text of what they were hired to do.

Read it back and ask what it tells someone that the title did not. Usually nothing. "Responsible for developing and maintaining backend services" is the same sentence for four thousand people.

It is the same fix as the resume. The actual thing you built, a verb that says you built it, and what changed because of it. If a bullet would be true for anyone with your title, it is not doing any work.

Featured

This is the section that matters most and the one almost nobody uses.

Featured is the only place on LinkedIn where you can put your actual work above the fold, with a thumbnail, where someone can click it without leaving the page they are on. Your site. Your best project. The repo. The case study. The thing you shipped.

Go look at yours. If it is empty, you have built the entire funnel and left the bottom of it blank, and every scan that reaches the end of your profile just stops there.

Being findable at all

Everything above assumes someone already landed on you. Getting found is a different problem.

Recruiters search LinkedIn with the same words that are in the job description. If you have done the work but you describe it in words nobody searches, you are invisible to the exact people hiring for exactly what you do. Same trap as the resume: "AI/ML experience" filters nothing, "agent harnesses, tool calling, eval harnesses" is a thing someone types into a search box.

Connections matter more than people think, and not for the reason they think. It is not a vanity number. It is that most recruiter search results are ordered with your network in the picture, so the closer you are to the people hiring in your field, the more often you appear at all. Connect with people in the roles and companies you want. Not to pitch them. Just to exist inside the graph they search.

What closes the tab

These are the ones where I stopped reading, and none of them are about whether the person was any good.

• A blurry, cropped, or four-year-old photo
• The default banner, untouched
• A headline that just repeats your job title
• An About section that opens with the word passionate
• Experience bullets copied out of the job description
• Nothing in Featured, and no link anywhere on the profile
• A wall of endorsements for skills nobody asked about
• Six months of reposted engagement bait and nothing you made
• A profile that contradicts your resume on dates or titles

That last one gets people more than they realize. I have your resume open in one tab and your profile in the other. If the dates do not match I am not going to assume it was a typo. I am going to wonder what else is off.

Make the three of them one funnel

Your resume, your LinkedIn, and your GitHub are not three chores. They are one path, and the path only works if each step hands off to the next.

The resume gets you looked up. LinkedIn is where they look you up, and its job is to survive the scan and produce a click. The click lands on your work. The work is what they actually talk about when they call you.

So make sure the links exist and go somewhere. The resume carries your site and your GitHub. LinkedIn carries the same links in Featured, not buried in a contact panel nobody opens. Your site links the projects. Every one of those handoffs is a place people currently drop the chain, and a broken chain means the scan ends at the most polished version of nothing.

And use tracking links, so you know which of those steps is actually working. If nobody ever opens the link, the problem is the profile. If they open it and leave in ten seconds, the problem is what they landed on. You cannot fix a funnel you cannot see, which is the whole argument of running your search as a loop.

Yara keeps the same body of work presented per company and tells you who opened what. Slight plug, and the last one.

Do this tonight

None of this takes a week. Most of it is an hour, and it is the highest return hour in your whole search because it applies to every role at once instead of one application at a time.

• Replace the photo with a tight, well-lit crop of your face.
• Put one line on the banner. What you do, where the work lives.
• Rewrite the headline so it says the thing you own and the proof, not your title.
• Rewrite the first two lines of About. Nothing below them counts.
• Fix your current role's bullets the way you fixed your resume.
• Put your best work in Featured. It is probably empty.
• Check your profile against your resume for dates and titles that disagree.

The one question

Open your profile and ask: if I had never met me, is there one thing on this page I would click?

Not a list of places you have worked. One thing that makes a stranger curious enough to spend another thirty seconds on you.

If there is nothing, that is not a confidence problem or a market problem. It is a page you have not finished. Go finish it.

Frequently asked questions