How to optimise your LinkedIn profile for recruiters

Recruiters do not browse LinkedIn. They search it, usually in Recruiter, usually with a boolean string of job titles and skills. Optimising a profile means understanding what that search reads.

What the search actually indexes

In rough order of weight: your headline, your current job title, your past job titles, your skills, and the body text of your experience entries. Your About section is indexed but carries less weight than people assume.

The practical consequence: if you want to be found for a role, the words for that role need to be in your headline and your titles, not only in your About.

The headline

You have 220 characters and most people use twelve of them on their job title. Use it for the role plus what you actually do.

Senior Analyst at Acme Corp

Better:

Senior Data Analyst · SQL, Python, experimentation ·
B2B SaaS growth and retention

The second version contains four searchable terms and tells a human what you do. It is not keyword stuffing — every term is one you would defend.

The About section

Three short paragraphs, written in the first person. What you do, what you have done that is worth knowing, and what you are interested in next. The last one matters more than people think — it is how a recruiter decides whether to bother.

Only the first two lines show before "see more", so the first sentence has to work alone.

Experience entries

Not a copy of your résumé. Two or three lines per role, written for someone browsing rather than assessing, with the outcome in it. Long bullet lists get skipped on a phone, which is where most of this is read.

Skills

This is a direct search field, so it is worth attention. Pin the three that matter most for the role you want. Remove the ones that pull you towards a job you are trying to leave — a profile full of skills from your last career is how you keep getting contacted about it.

What does not matter as much as claimed

• Posting frequency. It affects your feed reach, not whether you appear in a recruiter search.
• Connection count past a few hundred.
• Endorsements from people who have not worked with you.
• The banner image.

Rewriting it against a target role

ORQILO rewrites the headline, About and experience against the role you are actually aiming at, working from the career record it already holds rather than a blank prompt — so the profile and your résumé tell the same story.