Standardized LinkedIn profiles by department: what HR can learn from the Authority Score

Every company with more than one department active on LinkedIn (sales, customer success, engineering, consulting) has, without knowing it, a quite different profile-quality picture between those teams. This guide shows how to turn the Authority Score, originally built to evaluate an individual profile, into a benchmarking tool across departments, useful for HR to decide where to invest time and budget first.

What the Authority Score is (recap)

In short: it's the indicator ProLeap uses to measure the strength of a LinkedIn profile, section by section (photo, banner, headline, "About," experience, and recommendations). For a full breakdown of how each score range is interpreted, see the What is the Authority Score guide. Here, the focus isn't one person's isolated score, but what happens when that same calculation is applied to an entire team and grouped by department.

Why look by department, not just by person

An individual score is useful for that person to understand what to adjust on their profile. But for HR, deciding where to invest training time, consulting budget, or employer branding attention rarely happens person by person: it happens by department, because that's how budget and priority are set at most companies.

When the score is aggregated by department, a problem scattered across 50 or 100 individual profiles becomes a manageable decision: "the sales team averages 58, the engineering team averages 71, so the initial investment should go to sales." That's more actionable than a list of 50 individual reports with no priority hierarchy among them.

Metrics worth tracking

Besides the overall Authority Score average by department, three simple indicators already give a clear read of where to act first:

How to interpret gaps between departments

There's no universal pattern for which department usually scores higher, but a few patterns show up frequently. Sales teams tend to have stronger headlines (from the habit of positioning themselves commercially), but weaker "About" and experience sections, because they rarely stop to rewrite their own history. Technical teams usually show the opposite pattern: experience entries that are well-detailed technically, but a generic headline ("Backend Developer") and little specialization positioning.

The value of looking by department isn't finding "the right department," it's understanding that each one probably needs a different type of intervention: one might need help with headline and positioning, another might need help turning technical detail into a measurable result using the STAR method.

A benchmarking example across departments

A hypothetical survey at a technology company with four departments active on LinkedIn could look like this:

With this picture, deciding where to start stops being intuition: engineering and customer success emerge as priorities, each with a different, specific gap, which allows for designing a targeted intervention instead of generic training for the whole company.

Turning this into an HR routine

A single diagnostic has value, but the bigger return comes from repeating the measurement in regular cycles, quarterly or biannually, aligned with milestones the company already tracks: onboarding new hires, internal promotion cycles, or department goal reviews. This lets HR answer two questions it usually can't answer today: is the employer branding program working? And which department needs reinforced investment in the next cycle?

Repeating the measurement more often than that rarely changes the picture in a meaningful way, because profiles take a few weeks to reflect real changes. Measuring only once, on the other hand, completely loses the ability to show progress, which tends to be the strongest argument for keeping the program's budget the following year.

How to apply this to your team

Calculating one profile's Authority Score manually already takes time. Doing it for 50 or 100 people, and still grouping it by department manually, is practically unfeasible within HR's normal routine. That's why Salto Solutions adapted ProLeap's diagnostic technology for bulk analysis: an individual report per person, plus an aggregated view by department, delivered automatically instead of a manual spreadsheet.

If your company wants a picture like the example above for its own team, talk to Salto Solutions to understand how to structure a bulk diagnostic by department.

Frequently asked questions

Next step

Before running a diagnostic by department, it's worth understanding how individual employer branding connects to this collective process. Also see why employer branding starts with each employee's profile or analyze a profile now to see the format of the individual report that makes up the department-level diagnostic.