By Erick Inoue, founder of ProLeap
A good profile isn't luck or charisma, it's the combination of 6 specific adjustments that, together, change how recruiters and clients perceive your trajectory. This guide covers each one, with real before-and-after examples.
TL;DR
Having a good LinkedIn profile depends on 6 adjustments: a professional photo and banner, a headline with a value proposition (not just your title), a first-person "About" section, experience described in STAR format with measurable results, prioritized skills, and specific recommendations. Done together, these adjustments change your profile's click-through rate and how visitors perceive it, from recruiters to potential clients.
Each adjustment alone already improves your profile. Together, they completely change how you're perceived.
Before a single word is read, your photo has already formed a first impression. Use a sharp headshot with good lighting, a neutral background, and a bust-length crop, and customize the banner (the blank space most people leave at LinkedIn's default) to reinforce your area of expertise.
Cropped photo from a party, LinkedIn's default light-blue banner
Bust-length photo with neutral background, banner with area of expertise and a short differentiator in text
The headline is the most-read field on the profile, and LinkedIn auto-fills it with your current title, the minimum, not the ideal. A headline that attracts recruiters answers three questions in one sentence: what you do, for whom, and with what result.
"Marketing Manager"
"B2B Marketing Manager · Growth and paid acquisition · +60% qualified leads in 12 months"
The "About" section (up to 2,600 characters) is LinkedIn's most wasted space: empty, generic, or a third-person copy of the resume. A good profile uses this space to tell the trajectory in its own voice, what got you here and what you're looking for next.
"Marketing professional focused on performance, responsible for digital campaigns."
"Over the past 5 years, I scaled performance teams from 2 to 12 people and tripled qualified lead volume without increasing CAC..."
Listing responsibilities ("responsible for team management") doesn't convince anyone. What actually improves a profile is describing each experience in the STAR format (Situation, Task, Action, Result), showing the context of the challenge and the measurable impact of the work.
See the full STAR method guide with more examples →A good profile doesn't list every possible skill, it lists the ones that reinforce the intended positioning, in the right order (the top 3 are the most visible to profile visitors and to LinkedIn's internal search), and removes ones that create noise or are already outdated.
Recommendations written by former managers, colleagues, or clients validate what the rest of the profile describes. Most profiles have zero or one recommendation too generic to carry weight. Asking for specific recommendations ("talk about the X project we worked on together") produces far more convincing text.
You already know what to adjust. Want to know where your profile is weakest right now?
Besides the steps above, turn on "Open to Work" with visibility set to recruiters only (not public, if you're still employed), use keywords from your field in your headline and skills (that's how recruiters filter searches), and keep your location and industry always up to date.
Following the 6 steps in this guide carefully, between 2 and 4 hours spread over a few days, most of the time goes into rewriting experience in the STAR format, which requires recalling numbers and results from each role. Photo, banner, and headline are quick, usually under 30 minutes combined.
You can go step by step, and we recommend it: start with photo and headline, which give the biggest perception gain for the least effort, then "About," and finally experience (which takes more work, but is where most of the credibility lives for anyone reading the full profile).
The fundamentals (photo, headline, "About," results-driven experience) are the same. The difference is in signaling: someone actively job-hunting can turn on "Open to Work" and adapt the headline to make availability clear; someone employed usually prioritizes positioning geared more toward authority and networking than an active search.
A good sign is being able to answer "yes" to every item in this guide without reservations. For a more objective answer, an automated analysis compares your profile against high-performing profile patterns in your field and returns a score, instead of relying only on your own perception.
Erick Inoue
Founder of ProLeap and Salto Solutions, specialist in executive branding and AI-powered LinkedIn profile diagnosis.
LinkedInInstead of reviewing item by item on your own, ProLeap analyzes your LinkedIn profile in minutes and returns a complete diagnostic, with a score per section and rewritten text ready to paste.
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