LinkedIn profile tips: improve visibility to recruiters

Three elements, and nothing else is visible at this stage: your name, your photo, your headline.

Photo. Recent, recognisable, and looking like you look at work. Not a holiday crop, not a photo from nine years ago, not the default grey silhouette. This is a low bar and a surprising number of profiles fail it.

Headline. The single most valuable field on the profile, because it is the only line of content that appears in the search result. A headline that is just your job title wastes it.

Name. One consistent romanisation, matching your CV and your email signature.

The reader has clicked. They see the banner, the headline again, your location, and the opening of your About section.

Banner. The default is a wasted strip of colour. Anything relevant — your city, your sector, a plain image — is better, and it signals that the profile is maintained.

Location. Set to where you are and where you want to work. A location left on a previous city removes you from searches silently, and it is the most common unforced error on this list.

The opening of About. Treat the first lines as the hook. They are the first part a reader encounters, so write them to work on their own and to give a reason to keep going.

Most profiles put a job description here. The ones that produce conversations put results.

The first three lines are the ones that get read. Lead with what changed, not what you were responsible for.

Keep the title searchable. An internal title nobody outside your company uses will not be found. If your official title is unusual, use the recognisable equivalent and put the internal one in the description.

Say the scale. Team size, budget, number of sites, portfolio. Two numbers do more than a paragraph.

Past roles. Complete, with dates. An unexplained gap in a profile is more conspicuous than in a CV, because the reader can see the whole history at once.

Skills. Ordered so that the top entries are the terms a recruiter would actually type. Not your softest, most agreeable qualities — the concrete ones.

Recommendations. Two good ones from people whose judgment carries weight outperform eleven generic ones. Most people never ask, which is the only reason they do not have them.

Custom URL. Your name, not a string of digits. Two minutes.

Featured. Useful if you have something worth featuring. Empty is better than padded.

The whole list above is more than anyone does in one sitting. Here is what to do if you have one hour, in order, with the highest return first.

FIRST 10 MINUTES — the silent killers
[ ] Location set to the right city and country
[ ] Photo is recent and looks like me at work
[ ] Custom URL is my name
[ ] Current job title is one a recruiter would search for

NEXT 20 MINUTES — the line that does the most work
[ ] Headline rewritten: what I do + for whom + one term I want to be found for
[ ] Read it back as it would appear in a list of results
[ ] Skills reordered so the top three are searchable terms

NEXT 20 MINUTES — the first read after the click
[ ] Opening lines of About rewritten to work on their own
[ ] First three lines of current role changed from duties to results
[ ] One number added to the current role

LAST 10 MINUTES — the things nobody does
[ ] Banner changed from the default
[ ] Two recommendation requests sent, each with a sentence
    saying what I would like them to mention
[ ] Dates and titles checked against my CV, line by line

DONE. Now leave it alone for two weeks and watch the view count.

Copy the block — nothing to download and no email required.

The last instruction is part of the method. If you change fourteen things and something improves, you have learned nothing about which change did it.

The examples below are written for this page. They are illustrations, not real profiles.

Skills, reordered

Before: Communication · Teamwork · Microsoft Office · Leadership · Time Management · Problem Solving

After: Procurement · Contract Negotiation · Supplier Management · SAP MM · Category Strategy · Tender Evaluation

The first list is six things every applicant claims and nobody searches for. The second is what someone looking for this person would type.

A past role

Before: "Procurement Officer — responsible for purchasing activities and vendor coordination."

After: "Procurement Officer — ran tendering for facilities and MRO categories, around SAR 30m of annual spend across 40+ suppliers. Introduced a pre-qualification step that cut the average tender cycle by two weeks."

Past roles are where profiles go slack. The reader uses them to judge trajectory, so a duty list there flattens your whole history.

Asking for a recommendation

Before: "Hi, hope you are well. Could you please write me a recommendation on LinkedIn? Thank you."

After: "Hi Faisal — I am updating my profile and I would value a recommendation from you if you are willing. If it helps, the thing I would most like mentioned is the supplier consolidation work we did in 2024, since that is closest to the roles I am looking at. Two or three sentences is plenty, and no problem at all if you would rather not."

The second version is answerable in five minutes, which is the whole reason it gets answered. Most unanswered requests fail because they ask the other person to do the thinking.

Treating the profile as a CV. Same facts, different job. The CV argues to someone who already has your application; the profile argues to someone who has not met you.

Keyword stuffing the headline. It reads as desperate to the human reader, who is the second reader and the deciding one.

Letting the profile contradict the CV. Titles, dates and employers must match exactly.

Updating everything the week you start looking. It is visible, and it is the least discreet way to start a search. Build the profile before you need it.

Writing in the third person. "Ahmed is a dedicated professional who…" reads as a press release about someone who is not present.

Leaving the headline as it was created. LinkedIn says a professional headline is usually created when you add a new current position, and that it can then be edited on its own. Whatever it starts as is a placeholder, not a headline.

Collecting endorsements instead of recommendations. Endorsements are a click. Recommendations are a paragraph someone wrote. Only one of them carries information.

Recruiters here search in both languages, sometimes within the same search, and specialist terms are frequently typed in English even in an otherwise Arabic search. Make sure the terms that matter appear in the language someone would type them in.

Keep the romanisation of your name consistent across your profile, CV, email signature and certificates. Multiple spellings of one Arabic name break both searches and verification.

Use the local term for your function where local and international usage differ. The reader is typing what they call the job here.

Visibility works in both directions. The market is interconnected; assume colleagues and your current employer can see what you change.

Set the location to the market you want, which for candidates returning from abroad is the single highest-value edit on this page.

Every six months, whether or not you are looking. Twenty minutes: current role, one new result, skills still accurate.

When something changes, add it at the time. Reconstructing a year of work from memory is how results get lost.

Before a search, do the sixty-minute pass. During one, leave it stable — changing the headline weekly is visible to anyone watching.

How complete does my profile need to be?

Complete enough that nothing obvious is missing, and specific enough that a stranger can tell what you do. Chasing a completeness meter is not the same as being findable.

Should I write it in Arabic or English?

In the language the people hiring you search in, which is often both. The practical test is whether the terms that matter appear in the language a recruiter would type them in.

Do I need to post content?

Not for being found or being convincing. Posting affects a third thing — whether you exist between job searches — and that is a real but separate question: LinkedIn profile optimization covers which of the three problems you actually have.

How long should the About section be?

Long enough to make one argument, which is usually three or four short paragraphs. The About section is the detailed version.

Are endorsements worth anything?

Very little on their own. Skills matter because of search; endorsements are decoration on top of them.

My profile is complete and nothing happens.

Then it is either not being found or not persuading, and those have different fixes. How recruiters find you tells you which.

Location, photo, URL, job title. Four fields, ten minutes, no writing required — and they are the ones most likely to be quietly costing you searches right now.

Then the headline, which is worth more than everything else combined: LinkedIn headline examples.