Most advice about LinkedIn treats it like a digital business card. It isn't. For recruiters, it's a search engine, and a profile that doesn't show up in the search may as well not exist. Optimizing it is two jobs: get found, then be convincing once someone arrives.
The headline does the searching for you
The field under your name is the single most weighted part of your profile for search. If it just says your job title at your current company, you're invisible for everything else. A recruiter looking for a "product designer" who knows "design systems" types those words. If they're not in your headline, you're not in the results.
Write it for the role you want, not only the one you have. "Product Designer, design systems and B2B SaaS" beats "Senior Designer at Acme" because it carries the terms people search and tells a reader what you do in five words. You have 220 characters. Spend them on findable language, not a slogan.
The About section is where you stop being a keyword
Once someone clicks, the headline's job is done and the About section takes over. This is where most profiles collapse into a third-person résumé summary nobody reads. Write it in first person. Open with the thing you're actually good at and the proof for it, not "I am a passionate professional."
Three short paragraphs is plenty: what you do and for whom, a concrete result or two, and what you're open to next. Recruiters skim this looking for a reason to keep going. Give them a specific one in the first two lines, because the section truncates and most never click "see more."
Experience entries are not your CV pasted in
A common mistake is copying CV bullets verbatim. LinkedIn is read more loosely, often on a phone, often by someone who isn't in your field yet. Lead each role with one plain sentence on what the job was, then the results. The recruiter reading you may be sourcing for an engineering lead while knowing little about engineering; clarity beats jargon density here.
If maintaining two versions of your history sounds tedious, that's the real friction most people hit. This is the gap a strong CV and a strong profile share, and tools like Postulit exist partly to keep a LinkedIn profile and a CV in sync rather than rewriting both by hand every time.
Activity is a ranking signal, not vanity
LinkedIn surfaces profiles that are active. You don't need to become an influencer. Commenting something substantive on a few posts a week in your field, and posting occasionally, keeps you in circulation and signals you're a real, current professional rather than a dormant account. Recruiters do notice the difference between a profile last touched two years ago and one that's clearly alive.
Get the basics right before the clever stuff
A recognizable photo, a banner that isn't the default, a custom URL, skills that match what you want to be found for, and a couple of recommendations from people who actually worked with you. None of this is sophisticated. All of it moves you ahead of the large number of profiles that skipped it.
The goal isn't a perfect profile. It's a profile that appears when the right person searches and gives them a clear reason to message you. Fix the headline first; it's the line doing the most work for the least effort.