The LinkedIn refresh that gets you found

Your headline is the single most important field on your profile. It appears in every search result, every comment you post, every message you send, and every notification a recruiter sees. Ninety percent of profiles waste it by copying their most recent job title verbatim.

The headline should describe what you want next, using the vocabulary of the roles you are targeting. "Product marketing leader focused on B2B SaaS growth | ex-[Company]" outperforms "Senior Product Marketing Manager at [Company]" by a wide margin in search visibility and in click-through from recruiters.

Include the two or three exact keywords a recruiter would search. If your target roles say "demand generation," your headline should include "demand generation." If they say "revenue operations," say "revenue operations." LinkedIn's search is literal.

The Open to Work tag on your photo is optional and public. The Open to Work signal to recruiters only (no photo overlay) is nearly universal-positive: it puts you into a filtered search recruiters use daily, and it does not appear to your current colleagues or public visitors.

Choose the recruiter-only version if you are still employed or if the public photo overlay feels uncomfortable. Choose the public overlay if you are actively out of role and want the widest inbound signal — the tag consistently drives referral messages within days of enabling it.

Fill in the job titles you are open to (up to five), the locations you are open to (remote counts as a location), and the start date. All three fields are used by recruiter search filters.

Open with one sentence naming what you do and who you do it for. "I help B2B SaaS companies scale their product marketing from Series B through IPO" is stronger than three paragraphs of career history.

Follow with a short second paragraph on your defining experience: two or three companies, two or three outcomes, expressed in scope and result. Third paragraph: the type of role you are looking for next. Fourth paragraph: how to reach you.

Do not write the About section in the third person. Third-person profiles read as staged. First-person profiles read as human. The vocabulary of a real conversation is what gets replies.

Each role should have three to five bullets that read like resume bullets, not job descriptions. Action verb, scope, result. "Led onboarding redesign for 400+ new hires across four regions, cutting time-to-productivity from six weeks to four" beats "Responsible for onboarding."

Front-load your top three roles. Older roles can shrink to a one-line summary. If a role is not part of the story you want to tell for the next job, keep the title and dates and drop the detail — LinkedIn is a marketing document, not a legal record.

LinkedIn lets you list fifty skills. Use all fifty. Pin the top three to match the roles you want most. Skills are one of the strongest signals recruiter search uses to filter — a profile with the right ten skills will surface in searches that a profile with the wrong ten skills will not, even if the resume text is identical.

Ask five current or former colleagues to endorse your top three skills. Endorsements are shallow signal on their own, but they raise your profile in search and they nudge more recruiters into your inbox. It is a fifteen-minute investment that pays for months.

A recent, clear, professionally-cropped photo raises your profile view rate by roughly 3–4x compared to no photo or a group photo. It does not need to be a paid headshot — a well-lit phone photo against a plain wall, from the shoulders up, is enough.

The banner is prime real estate that ninety percent of profiles waste on a default gradient. Replace it with a simple, on-brand image: your name in large text, your target role, and a one-line value statement. Canva has free templates that produce a professional banner in fifteen minutes.

The single move that most consistently accelerates a job search on LinkedIn is publishing three to five short posts over the first month of the search. Not viral thought leadership — short, calm, specific posts about what you are learning, what you are building, or what you are looking for.

One post announcing your search, worded plainly and forward-looking, will do more for your inbound recruiter volume than a hundred cold applications. Three follow-up posts over the next month keep you in the feeds of the people who saw the first one but did not act on it.

Do not vent publicly about a former employer. Ever. It is the single fastest way to lose the goodwill of your network at the exact moment you need it most.

Under Settings > Data privacy, turn on "Signal your interest to recruiters at companies you have created job alerts for." This adds a passive, invisible signal that meaningfully increases inbound.

Under Settings > Communications, set your preferred email to the one you actually read. Under Settings > Visibility, make sure your public profile is visible and that your profile photo is visible to "All LinkedIn members" or "Public." Recruiters filter out profiles they cannot see.