LinkedIn Profile Checker

How to check your LinkedIn profile

The check takes about a minute. Open your profile in another tab and copy the text across exactly as it is written now, typos and all. A tidied-up version scores a profile you have not published.

1. 1

   Copy four fields, unedited

   Your headline, your whole About section, the descriptions on your two or three most recent roles, and your skills list. If a field is empty, leave it empty. An empty About is one of the most useful things the review can tell you about.
2. 2

   Say what you want the profile to do

   This changes the entire review. “Senior backend roles at mid-size fintechs” produces different fixes to “freelance brand design clients”, because the words that need to be present are different. A vague goal gets you a vague review.
3. 3

   Read the ranked fixes before the score

   The number is the hook. The ranked list is the product, and it is ranked for a reason: fix the first two, then re-read the rest. Starting at the bottom because those look easier is how people spend an hour and change nothing that matters.
4. 4

   Rewrite, then run it once more

   A second pass tells you whether the edit landed. A fifth pass is you tuning wording to please a model, which is not the same as pleasing a human. Once the top fixes are gone, stop.

Nothing is saved, so copy anything you want to keep before you close the tab.

What the score is actually measuring

Five things, in roughly the order they affect whether anyone ever reads your profile.

• Headline. The highest-leverage field on the page, because it travels with you into every search result, comment, and connection request. It should contain the words someone would search to find a person like you, and then spend its remaining characters on specifics.
• About. Whether the opening lines say anything, since that is all that shows before the “see more” cut. Third-person corporate prose and a wall of adjectives both score badly.
• Experience. Whether your roles show outcomes or just duties. “Responsible for the onboarding funnel” tells a reader nothing that “rebuilt onboarding, cutting drop-off in the first week” tells them immediately.
• Skills. Whether the terms recruiters filter on are present at all. This is unglamorous and mostly mechanical, which is exactly why so many good profiles lose on it.
• Keywords. Whether the language of your own field appears anywhere. Profiles written entirely in internal company vocabulary are invisible to anyone outside that company.

What counts as a good score

The tool labels the number so you do not have to guess where you sit. The bands are ours, not LinkedIn's, and they describe how much work is left rather than how employable you are.

Score chasing is a trap. The only comparison worth making is your own number before and after a rewrite.

How recruiters actually search LinkedIn

Profile advice makes more sense once you know what happens on the other side. Recruiters do not browse. They run keyword searches, filter the results, and work down a list.

It is a text search, and it is literal

LinkedIn's help page on Boolean search sets out the operators its search accepts: quotation marks for an exact phrase, AND to require every term, OR to accept any of them, NOT to exclude one, and parentheses to group logic, with AND, OR and NOT typed in capitals. So a search for the exact phrase “product manager” does not match someone who calls themselves a product leader, and a search that excludes “assistant” drops anyone whose profile happens to contain the word.

The practical consequence is unglamorous. Use the words your target job postings use, spelled the way they spell them, in your headline, your job titles, your About section, and your skills. If your title internally was “Growth Pod Lead” and the market calls that role a product marketing manager, put both on the page. Nobody is searching for your company's org chart.

Spotlights sort the results before a human reads them

LinkedIn Recruiter groups results into spotlights, filters a recruiter clicks to prioritize a slice of the list. LinkedIn's Recruiter help page on spotlights defines them, and several are worth knowing because your own behavior puts you in them.

Two of those are levers you can pull today: follow a target company and engage with its posts, and get connected to people who work there. Both move you up a list you were already on rather than getting you onto it, so do the keyword work first.

The headline: your most valuable 220 characters

Fix this first, every time. Your headline appears under your name in search results, next to every comment you leave, and in every connection request, so it is the only part of your profile read by people who never visit it.

You get 220 characters, a figure LinkedIn's own talent blog gives when it tells recruiters to make them count. Two things then matter. First, the searchable terms have to be in there, because a keyword search reads this field as text like any other. Second, only the front of it survives: in search results and connection requests the headline is truncated, and where it stops moves with screen width, font size and which surface you are on. Search your own name on a phone and see where yours cuts off. Put the job title first and the flourish last, never the other way round.

Three patterns work, none of them clever. Title plus specialty plus the thing you are known for. Title plus who you do it for. Or, if you are between roles and would rather not lead with a former title, the work itself plus the level: “Backend engineering, Go and Postgres, seven years in payments”. Skip the rocket emojis, and do not open with “seeking new opportunities”. If the rewritten headline here is close but not quite you, the headline generator gives you six deliberately different versions.

The About section, and the three sentences that fix it

This is the highest-leverage fix on most profiles, because so many people leave it blank or fill it with something worse than blank. LinkedIn gives you far more room here than you should use, and only the first two or three lines show before the “see more” cut, so the opening does almost all of the work. You do not need a story. You need three sentences a stranger could read in ten seconds and then describe you to someone else.

1. What you do, in plain words. The job, the field, the level. Not your philosophy of work.
2. Who you do it for, or what kind of problem. This is the sentence that separates you from everyone with the same job title.
3. One specific thing you actually did. A real project, a real change, a real thing that shipped. One is enough, and one true one beats three vague ones.

Do not write in the third person: the reader knows the page is yours, so it reads as a press release. Do not open with “Welcome to my profile”, because that spends your most visible line on nothing. And if you want a line about what you are looking for, put it at the end.

Experience: turn duties into outcomes

The test is simple. If a sentence would be equally true of everyone who ever held your job title, it is a duty and it tells the reader nothing about you. Outcomes describe what happened because you were the one doing it.

You have more room per role than you should use. Our rule of thumb is three to five lines on each recent role, fewer as you go back in time, and nothing at all on the summer job from twelve years ago.

When you get stuck, ask what was different after you left the role compared with when you arrived: that is your list. And if you genuinely do not have numbers, do not invent them. A specific outcome with no number beats a fake percentage, and it survives the interview, where somebody will ask how you measured it.

Your job titles are searchable text too. If your official title is internal-sounding, put the recognizable equivalent alongside it rather than replacing it, so the page is both honest and findable.

Skills and endorsements, honestly

Skills are the most mechanical part of your profile, which is why strong candidates lose on them: they exist so that filters can find you. LinkedIn's help page on skills says you can add up to 100. Do not treat that as a target. The ones that matter are the terms a recruiter would type into a filter for the role you want, spelled the way the industry spells them, and as a rule of thumb ten to twenty covers it. Get them from the job postings you would apply to, not from memory. Everything past that is long tail: nobody filters on it, nobody reads it, and it makes the section look like a word cloud. Listing a skill you cannot talk about for five minutes is a straight downside, because the interview is where the claim gets checked.

Endorsements deserve less attention than they get. They are easy to collect, easy to reciprocate, and everyone knows it, so a large number is not read as evidence of much. A written recommendation from someone who managed you or worked next to you does carry weight, because it costs the writer real effort and it names specifics. That it is harder to ask for is exactly why it signals something.

Photo, banner, and the URL nobody fixes

Short section, because the advice is short. Have a photo, face clearly visible and reasonably large in the frame, taken in this decade. The banner behind it is free space most people leave as the default gradient, and something plain and relevant costs ten minutes. Neither will get you hired. A missing photo does make a profile feel abandoned, and that is the actual risk you are managing.

Your public profile URL is the fix almost nobody bothers with, and it takes under a minute. LinkedIn's help page on managing your public profile URL sets out the rules: a custom URL can be 3 to 100 characters, should not contain spaces, symbols, special characters or the word LinkedIn, and you can change it up to five times within six months. It also says that if you change it, the previous URL stays linked to you for six months unless you unlink it, so an old link on a resume does not break the moment you tidy things up.

Do it before you put the link on a resume, an email signature, or a business card, not after.

What “Open to Work” actually costs and gains

Two versions of this setting exist and they are different decisions, so read LinkedIn's own description rather than the folklore. The first is all LinkedIn members. LinkedIn says this also includes recruiters and people at your current company, and that it adds the #OpenToWork photo frame, the green ring people recognize. It works: it tells everyone who lands on your page what you want. It also tells your employer, your clients, and your entire network at the same time.

The second is recruiters only, which LinkedIn describes as people using LinkedIn Recruiter. Its wording is that to protect your privacy it takes steps to prevent LinkedIn Recruiter users who work at your company from seeing your shared career interests, but that it “can't guarantee complete privacy”.

A reasonable default: if you are unemployed or your search is not a secret, turn on the public version and take the free signal. If you are employed and quiet about it, use recruiters only, accept that it is imperfect, and lean on the keyword work in the sections above, which helps you without announcing anything.

How often to update it, and who else is reading

A reasonable habit, not a rule: twice a year when nothing has changed, plus a proper pass every time something real does happen, such as a new role, a promotion, or a project you would be pleased to be asked about. Editing constantly does not help you, and it is not a neutral act either.

Worth knowing if you're updating a profile while still employed: your LinkedIn activity is public, and a cluster of edits in a short window is one of the signals retention software is built to watch. It is what employers look for when they want to know who is about to leave, and there is an entire category of software, including ours, built on noticing it.

LinkedIn is not hiding this. Its description of the Active talent spotlight in Recruiter names people who recently updated their profile as one of the groups it surfaces. The same signal that makes you visible to an outside recruiter is visible to anyone else reading the same data, which increasingly includes your own employer. The employer's view of that pattern is written from the other side of the table and worth reading once.

None of this is a reason to leave a weak profile alone. A bad profile costs you opportunities every week it stays up, which is a certain cost against an uncertain one. Be deliberate about the timing rather than surprised by it. If you are still deciding whether you are leaving at all, the should I quit my job quiz is a more useful hour than another headline rewrite.

The mistakes worth checking for

Nothing here is exotic. Each one is easy to spot in your own profile once you know to look, and each one costs you readers.

• A headline that is just a job title. Accurate, and a waste of almost every character that could tell someone what kind of work you do and who you do it for.
• An empty About section. The cheapest thing on this list to fix, and three honest sentences beat a polished paragraph nobody wrote.
• Duties instead of outcomes. If a sentence would be true of everyone who ever held your job title, it isn't telling anyone about you.
• Adjectives doing the work of evidence. “Passionate”, “results-driven” and “dynamic” are claims anyone can make for free, which is precisely why they persuade nobody.
• Company jargon. Internal project names and team acronyms mean nothing to an outside reader and match nothing in a search.
• Buzzword stacking in the headline. Six terms separated by pipes looks thorough and reads as noise, and the tail of it is cut off in search results anyway.
• Third-person bios. “Marcus is a seasoned leader” on a page with Marcus's face at the top is an odd effect, and it puts distance between you and the reader for no gain.
• A profile written for a job you left. If your headline, About and skills all describe the role you are trying to move out of, every search that finds you is the wrong search.

What this tool cannot do

It reads text. It cannot see your photo, your banner, your recommendations, your activity, or how complete LinkedIn itself considers your profile, and those matter too. It also cannot verify anything you paste, so it will take your claims at face value and grade how well they are expressed. It will never invent an achievement for you, which occasionally disappoints people hoping for exactly that.

It has no visibility into how you actually rank in LinkedIn's search, and anyone claiming otherwise is guessing, because that ranking is not published. What a review like this can do is remove the reasons you would be filtered out before a human ever looks.

On privacy, the plain version: this is not a browser-only tool. What you paste is sent over HTTPS to our API and on to Anthropic to generate the review, under their API terms, then discarded. On our side it is not written to a database, not kept in logs, and not used to train anything, and nothing persists between visits. If there is something in your draft you would not want leaving your machine, take it out before you paste.