There are two job searches running at any time. The one you do — finding adverts, sending applications — and the one done to you: recruiters searching their way through millions of profiles for candidates who match a brief. The first search you control with effort. The second is controlled almost entirely by a document most people wrote in a hurry years ago and haven’t touched since.

Your LinkedIn profile is a shop window on a street where recruiters walk all day. Here’s how to dress it so it sells while you’re doing something else.

Understand how you’re found

Recruiters don’t browse — they search, using tools that filter by title, skills, location, industry and keywords. Your profile surfaces if it contains the words they searched for, then earns a click if the headline looks relevant, then earns a message if the whole page tells a coherent story.

That chain — found, clicked, messaged — is your design brief. Every improvement below strengthens one of its links.

Get the words in. Look up five job adverts for the role you want next. The nouns that recur — titles, systems, skills, certifications — are what recruiters type into their search bar. Those exact words need to appear in your profile: in the headline, the About section, the experience entries, and the Skills list. Not stuffed — used, in true sentences about what you’ve done. If you want service-management roles and your profile never says “service management,” you are invisible to every search that matters, however good you are.

Mind the title translation problem. Companies invent internal titles; recruiters search for market ones. If your business card said “Customer Success Ninja” or “Team Lead, Workflow Enablement,” add the translation: “Team Lead (Service Delivery Manager).” You can be loyal to your employer’s vocabulary or findable — pick findable.

The headline: 220 characters that do the heavy lifting

The default headline — your current job title at your current company — wastes the most valuable line on the page. It appears next to your name in every search result, every comment, every connection request.

Write it as what you do + proof + what you’re about: “IT Service Manager | 12 years running support for multi-site organisations | ITIL, M365, major-incident response.” Concrete, searchable, and specific enough that the right recruiter clicks and the wrong one doesn’t waste your time.

If you’re openly looking, say what you’re looking for, not just that you’re looking. “Open to work” with no direction attracts everything and lands nothing.

The About section: your story in eight lines

Nobody reads a wall of first-person mission statement. Structure the About section like this:

  • Two lines on what you are and the value you deliver — the elevator pitch, in plain speech.
  • Three or four lines of evidence — your two or three proudest, most concrete achievements, with numbers where you have them.
  • One line of texture — the human detail that makes messages easier to write (“Away from work I coach a junior football team, which is excellent incident-management training”).
  • One line on what’s next — the kind of role, problem, or organisation you’re aiming at.

Write it in the first person, and write it the way you speak. The About section is the one place on the profile where a voice fits — use yours.

Experience: your CV’s highlights, not its clone

Each role needs a two-or-three-line summary of what the job actually was (scale, scope, remit) plus your two or three strongest achievements. Don’t paste your whole CV — the profile is public, and it should intrigue rather than exhaust. Do keep it consistent with your CV: recruiters compare the two documents, and unexplained mismatches in titles or dates read as carelessness at best.

Fill in the often-skipped fields while you’re there: Skills (choose the ones matching your target adverts — these are search filters, not decoration), and ask two or three former colleagues for short recommendations. A specific two-line recommendation from a real manager outweighs any amount of self-description, because it’s the one part of the page you visibly didn’t write.

The photo, the banner, and the fifteen-second test

The photo needs exactly three qualities: recent, clearly your face, and appropriate to your industry’s register. The banner behind it is free advertising space almost everyone leaves as a blue default — even a simple image related to your field signals a tended profile.

Then apply the fifteen-second test: could a stranger, in fifteen seconds, say what you do, at what level, and what you’re looking for? That’s roughly the attention a recruiter gives before deciding to message you or move on.

Little and often beats grand relaunch

A profile that’s polished once and abandoned slides backwards — the algorithm and the recruiters both favour signs of life. You don’t need to become a content creator. Commenting usefully on posts in your field a couple of times a week, sharing the occasional article, congratulating contacts — low-effort activity keeps you circulating in feeds and search results.

And each time something real happens in your career — a project shipped, a system launched, a number achieved — spend the ninety seconds adding it while it’s fresh. A profile built from contemporaneous records beats one reconstructed from memory every time. The same, it turns out, is true of CVs.

CandidRecord keeps that contemporaneous record for you — achievements captured once, evidenced, ready for every CV, profile and application that follows. [Start capturing.]