You send the application, and within a day someone at the company types your name into LinkedIn. They might be a recruiter checking you are real, or a hiring manager deciding whether your CV is worth a call. Either way, they see your profile from the outside, without your context, and often only briefly.
That outside view is what a LinkedIn profile review should check. Looking at your profile while signed in and scrolling the whole page tells you very little, because nobody else reads it that way. A recruiter meets it in a fixed order: a search result, the top of the profile, the opening of your About, the first lines of each role, and a short list of skills.
This walkthrough follows that order. Each step takes a few minutes, and the whole review takes about twenty. It is built for the moment just before you apply, when the profile has to back up the CV you are about to send.
If your profile is mostly empty, start with our complete LinkedIn profile guide and come back. This post assumes the sections exist and asks whether they are working.
Before you start: get the stranger's copy
On your own profile, LinkedIn shows you edit buttons, private nudges and the full text of every section. Everyone else sees a folded, trimmed version.
The simplest way to get a neutral copy is LinkedIn's own export. On a computer, open your profile, click Resources (on some layouts it sits under More), then Save to PDF. You get a plain PDF with your headline, About, experience, education and top skills. It leaves out your photo, and it never shows the "see more" folds, so treat it as the raw text you are about to judge.
Keep the job ad you are applying for open next to it. A profile review without a target role turns into polishing for its own sake.
Step 1: The search row
Before anyone opens your profile, they see one row in a list of people: your name, your headline, your location and maybe a mutual connection. In that row LinkedIn cuts your headline to two lines and ends it with "…". Your headline can be up to 220 characters, but the search row shows roughly the first 170 to 190 of them, depending on the words.
Read just that part and ask: could a stranger say what job you do, and at what level?
A headline that fails the test:
Passionate about people | Driving growth through collaboration | Building high-performing teams | Lifelong learner | Coffee enthusiast | Ex-Deloitte | Open to new opportunities in the right organisation
Seven parts, none of them a job. At about 200 characters it runs past the search row, and the part that does show still gives a stranger no idea what to hire you for.
A headline that passes:
Senior Payroll Manager | UK and Ireland, 1,400 employees | Moved payroll in-house at a logistics firm
Job and level first, then one specialism or result. Three habits to look for and remove:
Stacked lists. If your headline has four or more parts, it reads as a tag cloud. Lead with the job and cut the list.
Repeated words. "Marketing leader | Marketing strategy | Marketing ops" spends the space saying one thing three times.
Stock phrases. "Results-driven", "passionate", "dynamic". Anyone could write them, so they tell the reader nothing.
Our resume headline examples are sorted by job and level, and most of them shorten well into a LinkedIn headline.
Step 2: Job titles people search for
Recruiters search LinkedIn mostly by job title. If your title is one nobody types, you can be a perfect fit and still never show up.
Check your current title and the two before it. Internal names cause most of the trouble: "Customer Happiness Hero", "Growth Ninja", "Associate II, Client Solutions". Those mean something inside the company and nothing in a search bar.
LinkedIn lets you write your own title for each role, so use the one a recruiter would type. If your employer's title is unusual, you can keep it and add the market term, for example "Client Solutions Associate (Account Manager)". Keep it close to the truth, though. The title on LinkedIn should be one your manager would recognise if a reference call came up.
While you are here, look at your title against the job ad. If the ad says "Product Manager" and every role on your profile says "Product Owner", that is the gap worth closing before you apply. Our guide to tailoring a resume to the job description covers how far you can push a title without stretching it.
Step 3: Role descriptions
Open the experience section of your PDF and look at your five most recent roles. For each one, ask two questions.
Is there a description at all? A role with only a title and dates gives a recruiter nothing to go on, and it gives LinkedIn less text to match against searches. Your current role matters most, so start there.
Do the first two lines say what you did? On the desktop profile, LinkedIn shows about two lines of each role, roughly 190 characters, and folds the rest behind "see more".
Compare these two openings for the same job:
Responsible for managing a variety of stakeholder relationships and supporting key business initiatives across the organisation.
Ran supplier onboarding for 60 vendors in Workday and cut average setup time from 15 days to 6.
The second names a system, a number and a result, all inside the first line. Name the products, tools, teams or figures you actually worked with. If you cannot think of a number, a named system or a named client still beats a general claim.
You do not need a number in every line. The same rhythm repeated down every role starts to read as generic. One concrete detail at the top of each role is enough.
Step 4: The top of your About
Your About can run to 2,600 characters. On a desktop profile, a visitor sees about four lines of it before "see more", which is roughly 450 characters if you write in one paragraph and much less if you open with short lines and blank space. In the LinkedIn phone app the same four lines hold about half that.
So the review question is narrow: in the part above the fold, do you name your job and one concrete result?
A weak opening spends the fold on scene-setting:
I'm a curious, people-first professional who believes great work happens at the intersection of strategy and execution. Over the years I've had the privilege of working with some amazing teams across a range of industries, and I love solving complex problems with creative thinking.
A stronger one gets to the point:
I run payroll for 1,400 people across the UK and Ireland. Over two years I moved us from a bureau and three spreadsheets to one in-house system, and payday errors fell from about 40 a month to under five.
Everything below the fold can carry the longer story. For how to write the rest of it, see the About section of our LinkedIn profile guide.
Step 5: Top skills your roles back up
LinkedIn lets you choose top skills, and those are the ones that appear in your PDF and near the top of your profile. The review check here is about evidence: does each top skill appear somewhere in your role descriptions or your About?
If your top skills are "Stakeholder Management, Python, Budgeting" and none of your roles mentions Python, a careful reader sees a claim with nothing behind it. Either pick top skills your roles already show, or add a line to the role where you used the skill.
This is also a good moment to compare against the job ad. If the ad's three most repeated requirements are missing from your top skills and your role text, the profile and the application are telling two different stories.
Step 6: The basics a filter checks
Some fields are dull and still decide whether you appear at all. Recruiters filter searches by location, current company and school, so check that:
your current role lists a company, not just a title
your location is set, and set to where you want to work if you are relocating
at least one school or training provider is listed under Education
Leaving one blank can drop you out of a filtered search before anyone reads a word.
Step 7: Your CV and your LinkedIn, side by side
A recruiter holding your CV and your profile notices when they disagree. The usual mismatches are dates that differ by a few months, a title that is senior on the CV and junior on LinkedIn, or a job that appears on one and not the other.
Some differences are fine. LinkedIn often shows a promotion as two roles at the same company while a CV merges them into one entry. A role you left off a short CV can sit on LinkedIn. What reads badly is a contradiction with no obvious reason, so line the two up role by role, check every start and end month, and fix whichever side is wrong.
If you are sending a CV in the same week, our job application checklist covers the rest of the pre-send checks.
Running the review with a checker
You can do all seven steps by hand with the PDF and a highlighter. We built the JobSprout LinkedIn profile checker to do the mechanical parts for you, from the same PDF.
A sample profile in the checker: the phone photo made into a headshot, the headline, About and current role rewritten, the fold drawn, and nothing left holding it back in search.
You drop in LinkedIn's PDF and the checker runs the basic checks a recruiter's search for your job title depends on: whether your current title is one they would search for, whether your headline says what you do, whether your main skills appear on your profile, and whether your current and recent roles are described. It tells you how many of those hold you back, and each one that fails goes to the top of your list to fix.
It also draws your profile the way a recruiter sees it, at LinkedIn's own widths, with the fold marked where LinkedIn hides the rest of your About behind "see more", and the change you're working on marked on the drawing. Three new headlines and the top skills to show are free straight away, and adding your CV means the headlines are written from it.
A few limits. It needs the English version of LinkedIn's PDF. LinkedIn only makes the PDF on a computer, so on a phone you start from your CV, which still gets you the headlines and skills to paste into the LinkedIn app. The PDF has no photo, so the drawing shows a grey circle in its place. The check is free, needs no account, and the profile text is deleted within about a day.
After the check, Write the rest takes your profile into JobSprout, where your About and every role are written from your CV, each showing the CV lines it came from. You work down the list one change at a time: copy it, paste it on LinkedIn, click Done. Add a newer PDF later and it shows which changes went live.
What you can skip before applying
Plenty of LinkedIn checklists will tell you to fix things that do not matter much the week you apply. We left these out of the checker on purpose, because none of them appears in what LinkedIn has published about how search ranking works:
Profile completeness percentage. It comes from LinkedIn's own prompts to fill in your profile.
Endorsement counts. Easy to inflate, and absent from published ranking features.
Connection count. LinkedIn publishes no role for it in search ranking.
How often you post. The feed and recruiter search are separate systems.
Keyword density. LinkedIn matches job titles, skills and companies. Repeating a word adds nothing.
Skill assessment badges. LinkedIn retired them.
Two things the PDF cannot show
Open to Work. If you are job hunting quietly, set Open to Work to recruiters only. You show up in their searches as available without the green frame on your photo.
Your photo. The PDF leaves it out, so check it separately. A recent, clear head-and-shoulders photo with a plain background is all you need. If you only have a selfie, our AI headshot generator turns one photo into a professional headshot, and you can preview it on your profile in the checker before you upload it.
The review in order
When you have twenty minutes before an application, run it in this order:
Save your profile as a PDF and open the job ad beside it.
Read the first two lines of your headline. Job and level first.
Check your current and previous two titles are ones people search for.
Make sure your five most recent roles have descriptions, with a concrete detail in the first line.
Read the first four lines of your About. Job and one result above the fold.
Check each top skill shows up in a role or your About.
Confirm company, location and school are filled in.
Line up your CV and LinkedIn role by role and fix any date or title that disagrees.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should I review my LinkedIn profile?
Run the full review before any application that matters, and a quick one whenever you change roles. The headline and the top of your About are the parts that go stale fastest.
What is a good LinkedIn profile score?
There is no universal pass mark, because LinkedIn publishes no score of its own. The JobSprout checker tests whether you'd turn up in a recruiter's basic search for your job title, each check pass or fail, so you can see exactly what a change fixed.
Can I check my LinkedIn profile without an account?
Yes. The check, three new headlines and the top skills to show are free with no JobSprout account. Writing your About and roles from your CV needs one, and the first time is free.
Does my LinkedIn need to match my CV exactly?
The facts should match: employers, titles and dates. The wording can differ, and LinkedIn can hold roles a short CV leaves out.
Should I review my profile on my phone or my computer?
Do the review on a computer, where LinkedIn lets you save the PDF. Then glance at it in the phone app, where your About shows about half as much before the fold.
