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​Dr. Kyle Elliott, tech career coach, executive coach, and trusted confidant to Silicon Valley’s top talent via CaffeinatedKyle.com.

gettyIf you’re looking for a new role, you’re likely aware that you need a presence on LinkedIn. What you may underestimate is the sheer competition there. LinkedIn now has more than 1.3 billion members, and job seekers submit roughly 8,200 applications on the platform every minute, according to LinkedIn’s pressroom. With that volume of applications, having recruiters come to you is a major advantage.​

I’m a career coach for tech leaders, so I often review clients’ profiles as part of our work to find them their next executive role. I’m also a group coach for HR and talent acquisition leaders, so I regularly hear directly from the people doing the sourcing about what draws them to a candidate.​

I recently worked with a client to update their LinkedIn profile as they pursued their first job search in nearly a decade. Before we optimized their profile, they were receiving one to two recruiter outreach messages per week. Afterward, they were receiving six to seven per week and could barely keep up.

While your results may vary, let’s discuss the practical steps you can take to increase your inbound messages from recruiters on the platform.​

1. Think like a recruiter when writing your LinkedIn profile.​When job seekers write their profile content, they often have the wrong reader in mind. If you want to be contacted by recruiters and executive headhunters on LinkedIn, you need to write your profile for them. Yet, when I audit clients’ profiles, the language they use is frequently inaccessible to the recruiters sourcing for their target roles. Remember that a recruiter will not speak the same way as a peer or hiring manager would.​

For example, an engineering leader might describe their work as “scaling distributed systems and driving platform reliability,” while the recruiter sourcing for the role might be typing “VP of Engineering” and “AI transformation” into the search bar. While both descriptions are technically accurate, you’ll likely only surface in a headhunter’s search if you include the second set of keywords.​

As you update your LinkedIn profile, imagine you’re a recruiter sourcing for a role. Make a list of the top 10 to 20 keywords or phrases a recruiter would enter when hunting for a candidate. This list will be critical in the subsequent step and can also be used to refine your résumé for cold job applications.​

2. Weave keywords throughout your profile.​Having said that, a common misstep is plugging every keyword into your profile’s Skills section and calling it a day. The recruiters and executive headhunters I speak with consistently share that they find candidates by running their own keyword searches and that the Skills section rarely factors into their sourcing.​

This means your keyword list must be woven throughout your profile. Focus first on your headline, the tagline that appears immediately beneath your name, since this is what inspires a recruiter to click through after you surface in their search. From there, incorporate the terms in context throughout your About section and job descriptions. This allows recruiters to quickly understand how your experience aligns with the roles they’re filling.​

3. Don’t give it all away.Job seekers also tend to “give too much away” on their LinkedIn profiles by mirroring their résumés word for word. This is a major mistake for a number of reasons. Most notably, if you share every detail on your profile, recruiters will have no reason to contact you. If recruiters are regularly viewing your profile but never messaging you, this may be why.​

Listing everything also dilutes your positioning. In this job market, recruiters are especially hunting for “purple squirrels,” candidates who match every requirement of the specific role they’re filling. A profile that tries to speak to every possible role doesn’t read as a precise match for any particular role.​

Additionally, if you’re oversharing on your profile, you may be posting confidential or proprietary information on a public platform. I typically advise clients to remove any details recruiters can’t find publicly online, whether it’s on the company’s website or in a shareholder report. To be safe, you can also mask sensitive figures, replacing them with XX% or $XXM.​

Publishing your full résumé also removes your ability to tailor it to each individual role. You should aim to share enough that recruiters find your profile and feel intrigued enough to reach out while still leaving them a reason to request your résumé with additional details.​

Final thoughts: Here’s how to be found.​An optimized, keyword-rich LinkedIn profile is a critical component of a modern-day job search. It’s also only one component, which works best alongside targeting the right companies and roles and building meaningful relationships with decision-makers at your prospective organizations.

In my experience, the leaders who receive consistent recruiter outreach treat their profiles as living documents, refreshing them every few months as their goals and wins evolve.

You’ve got this!

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