9 Ways to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for Recruiters to Find You Now
LinkedIn is your digital business card. Make it beautiful for algorithms and humans
We are constantly looking for ways to help you improve your LinkedIn profile.
For example:
We have a detailed interview with Kristof Schoenaerts, a senior-level recruiter who studies how search firms use LinkedIn when they hire key staff.
We created an AI-Optimized LinkedIn Profile Toolkit that you can download now to get seen by recruiters and be hired for a new job.
Bonus: Paid Career Pivot Subscribers get both for free!
9 Ways to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile
Did you know that LinkedIn is really a large database for recruiters?
Research shows that job seekers with a comprehensive LinkedIn profile have a 71% higher chance of getting a job interview.
We learned that you should write your profile for the algorithm first, and then the human. You want to appear when recruiters search for the job titles and skills relevant to the role you want to have next.
Only when you are on their short list, will things like your profile photo and about section matter. And then, only for the 10-20 seconds that a recruiter will look at your profile. That’s right - seconds.
Read below to learn how to optimize your profile by tailoring the sections that matter most, applying the Golden Formula to improve your headline, and mining for keywords to increase your search rankings, as well as other tips to help you get noticed.
1. Profile Picture Matters
Your profile picture is extremely important, as the lack of one will often mean the recruiter skips your profile entirely. There’s no magic to a perfect picture. It just needs to be clear, in-focus, of your face, and professional.
You can use Generative AI services to create an upgraded image - see Wayan’s profile picture or Regina's example. You can do this for under $30 at AragonAI or on other similar platforms.
2. Headline is Key
This is the most important part of the LinkedIn profile. With the 200-character limit, you want to follow the Golden Formula and include the role you want, your geographic area, your industry and/or sub-industry, and a unique differentiator.
This might sound like, “I’m a sales director focused on cardiovascular medical devices in the Middle East who thrives on transforming businesses.”
You do not want to list the role you had or a position no one is hiring for now. One person had "Foreign Service Officer’ in their headline. Sadly, no one is searching for FSOs to hire.
You should be looking to the future in the headline, not reliving the past. They could say, instead, “Strategy Lead, USA, Technology for Agriculture with a Global View”
3. About is Your Future View
This section should maximize the use of all relevant keywords that apply to the role you want. Remember, LinkedIn is a database for recruiters.
There are 1.1 billion LinkedIn profiles. Unlike other databases, these are mostly up to date. Microsoft’s business model for LinkedIn is based on the money they get from recruiters to access your profile. Make those recruiters happy to pay to find you.
This section, like the others listed here, should feature as many keywords as possible to optimize how the search engines will find you.
Draw from your experiences, projects, skills, industries, and differentiators, and write them up with keywords that match the keywords used in job descriptions for roles you want to apply for and by people in roles you would like to have.
For LinkedIn, keyword research is finding words a recruiter would use to look for you.
If you are unsure about what exactly you want to do next, have flexibility in the sectors or roles you are considering, or are open to various options, focus your headline on your core competencies, skills, and strengths that can transfer to various contexts.
So instead of saying “digital development advisor role,” say “leveraging digital technologies to solve business challenges.”
4. List All Your Experiences
Your experience section has a 2000-word limit, and you should use every bit of that you can. Remember, LinkedIn is a database. Very few recruiters will actually read your full LinkedIn profile (on average they spend 10 seconds or less looking at it). You are writing your experiences section for an algorithm so recruiters can find you.
You want your profile to come up within the first 50 entries out of what may be 17,000 potential candidates. Like with Google Search, no one reads past the first page of search results. While AI is not great for writing your LinkedIn profile, it is ideal for extracting keywords from job descriptions that you can then feature in your own profile.
Please be honest and truthful about your skills and experiences in a way that helps sell and translate your value to others. For example, instead of saying MERL Lead - a title no one outside of development knows - you can say Customer Insights Manager as the job title and then in the description, say, “As the MERL Lead, I focused on customer insights to..”
That way, you are helping the recruiter translate your title, not lying. Need help translating government titles? Here are 10 ways to rethink your title for the corporate world.
5. Fill Out Your Skills
This is the last section that really matters in your LinkedIn profile. You can list up to 100 skills, and best practice says you should list 100. Remember, you are optimizing your profile for the keyword search algorithm.
Do not include soft skills here since those will be evaluated during interviews and later assessments. Use the skills section of your profile to feature your hard, technical skills, making sure to highlight those skills that align with the job requirements for roles you're targeting.
Skip sections that neither LinkedIn nor recruiters look at. If not listed above, those sections don’t matter. Believe it or not, research shows that recommendations don’t matter to your search rankings on LinkedIn.
6. Remain Active on LinkedIn
Being active on LinkedIn will also increase your ranking. You can leave the LinkedIn webpage open on your computer all day to indicate that you are active.
Better yet, have Wayan’s posts page open to see the latest news.
You should also make a small change to your profile once every week. Just make sure to turn off the setting in which everyone gets notified every time you make a change.
7. Be Easy to Find
Selecting the “Open to Work” option will definitely help with your search ranking since it indicates you are more likely to apply for open roles. But you may not necessarily want to display the green “Open to Work” banner since this will make you prone to phishing and scamming. You can set this to “visible for recruiters only” when selecting the option.
Next, make sure that all your connections can see your email address. You can adjust this in Privacy > Visibility. The default is that it’s visible just first connections, and you’ll want to expand this to all connections. This will also increase your chances of recruiters being in touch since the LinkedIn email platform is not ideal.
Finally, the closer you are in a recruiter’s network, the higher you will show up in their search ranking. Connect with as many recruiters as possible. When you connect, send a request without a message since this is their preference and will increase the likelihood that they will accept your request.
8. Actively Network Using LinkedIn
Don’t make a perfect profile and then sit back and wait to be contacted. You should take control of your job search by actively researching organizations doing work you want to do; people at those organizations within your first, second, or third connections; or people with similar skills to you that are working in relevant fields.
Once you’ve searched and found new connections, reach out to them to ask about their role, their career path, their company culture, any resource recommendations they have, or other people they can connect you to.
Your LinkedIn connections are potential allies and partners. Most people love to talk about themselves, share their stories, and name drop others they know, which can all help you build your own network. You can easily revisit connections years later regardless of whether you even remember how you were initially connected.
LinkedIn even makes networking easier for introverts because you can connect with people virtually first without having every interaction be in person, face to face.
Remember when you are reaching out to new contacts, you are not asking for a job. If you were, they would just point you to HR or a recruiter, or state there are no open roles they know of.
Instead, leverage your connections and interactions to build your network further. Ask them to share their story and connect you with others. People generally want to help and your job is to make it easy for them to do so.
Bonus: Since you read this far, here is an offer for you. Look at Wayan’s 10,000 connections. Is there anyone who works at a company that interests you? If so, then email him, detailing a) who you want to meet (include their LI profile URL), b) why you’re interested in meeting them, and c) your LI profile URL. He’ll make the introduction on LinkedIn for you.
9. Share Valuable Content
If you have valuable content you can share, use LinkedIn to tag relevant individuals using the “at” symbol. You can also build relationships by interacting and engaging with others about their posted content or sharing their posts even further across your network.
Tag someone to show you are thinking of them and how their work relates to that content, connect people you know that are interested in the same topics or working in the same field, or share content that you find compelling, and think might interest others as well.
Sharing content of value can be a powerful tool for broadening and engaging your network.
The AI-Optimized LinkedIn Profile Toolkit is your playbook to be found by recruiters and improve your networking efforts.
This is a 40 page, practical guide built for professionals like you. You’ll learn how to:
Translate your past roles into private-sector positions.
Write an “About” section that actually gets read.
Use ChatGPT to rewrite bullet points, headlines with impact.
Focus on what counts, and ignore the rest.
Stop wondering what’s wrong with your job search. Start fixing what matters most: your discoverability. Be seen, be found, be hired!
Download the toolkit now and build a profile that shows up in recruiter searches, gets you interviews, and reflects your next career—not your last one