There are two ways to use LinkedIn. One is as a place people land after they've already heard of you — an application, a referral, a name in an email. The other is as a database recruiters search when they have a role to fill and no candidates.

Most profile advice optimises for the first and quietly ignores the second. But the second is where the unexpected opportunities come from, and it rewards a completely different set of choices.

How recruiters actually search

LinkedIn Recruiter is a search product. A recruiter filling a role typically runs a boolean query against titles, skills, and keywords, filters by location and years of experience, then works down the result list.

What that means for you:

Being findable beats being impressive. A profile that ranks on page one of a search for "senior data engineer, Berlin" gets contacted. A better profile on page nine does not.
A few fields carry most of the weight. Headline, current title, past titles, skills, and the About section are indexed heavily. Recommendations, featured links and your banner image are not search signals at all.
Keyword and activity matter. Profiles that are complete and recently active surface more often than dormant ones with identical text.

The seven fields that matter, in order

1. Headline — the highest-leverage 220 characters on the site

The default headline is your current job title at your current company, which is a wasted field. It appears in search results, in comments, in messages, and it is weighted in search.

The structure that works: role + specialisation + tools/domain.

❌ Software Engineer at Monzo

✅ Senior Backend Engineer at Monzo · Go, Kubernetes, event-driven payments infrastructure

❌ Marketing Manager | Coffee Lover | Dog Dad 🐕

✅ B2B Demand Generation Manager · SaaS · Paid search, lifecycle email, HubSpot

The second version of each is findable in searches the first version misses entirely. Personality belongs in the About section, where it costs you nothing.

If you're job hunting openly, "Open to [role]" in the headline works. If you're looking quietly, use the Open to Work setting with visibility restricted to recruiters — it's a search filter recruiters use constantly, and it isn't visible to your employer.

2. Skills — 50 slots, ranked

The skills list is directly searchable and LinkedIn caps it at 50. Use most of them, and get the order right: the top three appear on your profile and should be the three you most want to be hired for.

Prioritise concrete, searchable nouns. "Kubernetes", "Financial modelling", "Salesforce CPQ" are searched. "Leadership", "Communication", "Problem-solving" are not — nobody has ever run a Recruiter search for "hardworking".

Endorsements are a weak signal but a real tiebreaker. Getting five colleagues to endorse your top three skills takes one message.

3. Job titles — the ones people search for

If your official title is "Growth Ninja" or "Member of Technical Staff III", you are invisible to searches for what you actually do. LinkedIn lets you set the title field freely.

The honest fix is a mapped title: Senior Software Engineer (Member of Technical Staff III). Searchable, accurate, no invention.

4. About — first two lines are the whole game

LinkedIn truncates the About section after roughly 300 characters behind a "see more" link. Most readers never click it. Front-load accordingly.

A structure that reads well:

Two lines: what you do and the scope of it, concretely.
Three or four lines: what you specialise in, with the tools and domains named — this is your keyword paragraph, written as prose.
Two lines: what you're looking for, or what to contact you about.

Write it in first person. Third-person About sections ("Sarah is a passionate…") read as a press release.

5. Experience — bullets, not paragraphs

Same discipline as a resume: a line of context about the role's scope, then three to five bullets with numbers in them. Blocks of unbroken prose don't get read.

Include the tools you used inside the bullets. It's where the keywords belong, and it's the difference between claiming a skill and evidencing it.

6. Photo and banner

The photo is not a search signal but it is a response-rate signal: profiles with a photo get substantially more engagement. It needs to be your face, well lit, roughly 60% of the frame, with a plain background. It does not need to be professionally shot.

The banner is free real estate that most people leave as the default blue. A plain band with your specialisation or portfolio URL is a small, cheap upgrade.

7. Custom URL

linkedin.com/in/yourname rather than linkedin.com/in/yourname-8a4f2b91. Two minutes in settings, and it's what goes on your resume.

What to ignore

Posting for the algorithm. Regular posting builds an audience, which is valuable and slow. It is not how recruiters find candidates for a specific role. If you're job hunting on a deadline, fixing your headline and skills beats a content calendar.

Endorsement-swapping with strangers. Weak signal, and it clutters your skills with things you don't do.

Recommendation counts. Two or three specific recommendations from people who managed you are useful when a hiring manager reads your profile. Fifteen generic ones are noise, and none of them affect search.

Certifications as decoration. Add them if they're demanded in job postings for your target role. Otherwise they're filler.

A 30-minute pass

If you do nothing else:

Rewrite the headline — role, specialisation, tools. (10 minutes)
Reorder your top three skills and fill the list to 30+. (10 minutes)
Rewrite the first two lines of About so the important part is above the fold. (5 minutes)
Turn on Open to Work, recruiters-only, with your target titles and locations. (2 minutes)
Set your custom URL. (2 minutes)

Those five changes cover most of what search actually weights.

If you'd rather see it diffed against a specific job description first, Terview's LinkedIn optimizer reads your profile, compares it to the roles you're targeting, and rewrites the headline, About and skills for search — then shows you what changed and why.

The part nobody says

An optimised profile increases how often you appear in searches. It does not change what happens next, which is a recruiter reading your experience and deciding whether to reach out.

So make it findable, then make it honest. Profiles engineered purely for keywords get opened and closed. The goal is to be found by the searches you'd genuinely want to be found by.

How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for Recruiter Search