In Part I of creating a great LinkedIn profile for job seekers, we explained why having a LinkedIn profile is important and what makes it stand out. We talked about the importance of a good photo and how choosing the right tagline can help attract recruiters. We also covered the About section, sharing tips to make it interesting and full of useful keywords. In Part II, we’re going to take things to the next level.

In Part II, you will learn about:

Your Activity section, and the importance of engaging

Your Experience section, the similarities and differences from a resume

Your Education section, and how to make it more appealing

Your Skills section, how to feature the right skills for you

Your Recommendations section, focusing on quality over quantity

Let’s jump into Part II of our LinkedIn profile guide and explore the other important sections. We’ll also explain how recruiters use these parts of your profile to find the right candidates during their searches.

LinkedIn profile Activity section

Are you active on LinkedIn? Do you spend time engaging with others by leaving friendly feedback on their posts? Being active on LinkedIn is important for keeping your profile strong and noticeable. It helps you grow your network with quality connections and attracts people who share your interests and want to connect with you.

Second, interacting with your network makes you more visible in the Activity section of your LinkedIn profile –and the text in your comments is searchable! This means your comments can help others find you, as long as they’re genuine and relevant. For example, if you want to appear in searches for the word “engineer,” follow other engineers and leave thoughtful comments on their posts using the word “engineer.” You can also share posts that include this keyword to make yourself even more visible.

Third, what you do on LinkedIn affects the content that shows up in your feed. The platform’s algorithms show you more posts similar to the ones you “like” or comment on, assuming those are topics you’re interested in. If you want to see more posts about engineering jobs, companies, or topics, start “liking” and commenting on posts about engineering. It’s an easy way to make your feed match your interests.

But most important, understand this: “Posting is not a one-and-done thing. It’s a career management strategy and a regular activity that you do once or twice a week, every week,” says Robin Ryan, on Forbes. “So, schedule the time to do this on your calendar. It shouldn’t take you more than five minutes. Give this some thought, then list some topics you’d stop to read about.”

Too many people treat LinkedIn like a bulletin board, stopping by just to post an “I need a job” notice and expecting recruiters or connections to instantly offer help. But that’s not how LinkedIn works. Underneath it all, LinkedIn is a community of professionals who build strong relationships by sharing helpful content and supporting each other’s success. This community doesn’t respond well to a “bulletin board” approach because it can feel selfish and one-sided.

Your LinkedIn profile Experience section

At first, this section might seem simple: a place to list your work experience in reverse order, just like on a résumé. So why not just copy and paste from your résumé? Because the audience for your LinkedIn Experience section is much bigger. It’s not just for recruiters. It’s also for colleagues, peers, and potential connections who want to see your professional story in a more interesting and engaging way.

When you have an interesting story to tell, you don’t tell it the exact same way to everyone. Instead, you adjust it depending on who you’re talking to. The facts stay the same, but you might add details for one audience or leave some parts out to make it shorter and more relevant for another. The same idea applies when sharing your career story on LinkedIn versus on your résumé.

Your résumé should be short and focused on the specific job and company you’re applying to. Leave out details that don’t matter for that job, and highlight the skills and qualifications that match what they’re looking for.

Your LinkedIn Experience section gives a more complete view of your work history than a résumé. It lets you go into more detail about each job, giving people a better understanding of your professional journey. Unlike a résumé, which is often skimmed quickly, people usually spend more time reading your LinkedIn profile. This gives you the chance to make your experience more interesting and impactful. You can also add attachments, like project samples or documents, to show off your accomplishments from each job.

Your LinkedIn Experience section shouldn’t go in every direction. It should still focus on the industry and type of job you want. In Part I, we talked about using keywords in your Tagline and About sections to help recruiters find you when they search for candidates with those keywords.

It’s important to use keywords that recruiters or hiring managers might type in when searching for candidates. But your LinkedIn profile should offer more than the basic, plain bullet points you’d see on a résumé. Let’s look at an example to see how a statement can be different on a résumé compared to a LinkedIn profile.

Know your audience

Imagine you’re applying for a recruiting job and have several years of experience. In your last role, you worked at a small company where you had to take on many different tasks. Besides your recruiting duties, you helped the marketing team with their work and even took over an unrelated project when the person in charge left unexpectedly.

These other “hats” gave you new skills and accomplishments that are valuable. In fact, the project you took over enabled your company to receive government contracts, increasing revenue by $1 million!

Now that you’re looking for a recruiting job, remember that a résumé should focus on specific experiences that match the job you want. While you might be proud of your marketing and project management experience, it might not directly relate to recruiting. Adding those details could confuse recruiters or take attention away from the key skills they’re looking for.

On LinkedIn, you have more freedom to highlight extra skills and accomplishments. Even if they don’t directly relate to a recruiting job, they can show a bigger picture of what you can do. People reading your LinkedIn profile will notice these experiences and see you as a team player—someone who is flexible, willing to help others, and a great asset to any organization.

One big advantage of your LinkedIn Experience section is that you can easily highlight your advancements and promotions. Unlike a résumé, where these might get lost in bullet points or placed at the bottom, LinkedIn lets you showcase them clearly. After listing your responsibilities and accomplishments for each job, just add a space and point out your promotions so they stand out.

Finally, while a résumé lets you highlight your top skills in a Core Competencies section, LinkedIn goes further. You can list your key skills after each job in your Experience section to make them stand out even more. This helps your audience clearly see your strengths and makes a lasting impression.

Resume and Experience section similarities

Even though a résumé and a LinkedIn Experience section are different, some things need to stay consistent –like job titles and dates. Keeping the key details the same helps build trust and creates a clear, professional story about your career.

Tailor your experiences to a target position in the following ways:

• Use common job titles. If a previous job gave you a title like “Client Happiness Engineer,” a recruiter searching for a “Customer Service Agent,” or even a “Customer Success Associate” will not likely find you. Use titles that are most common to your target job, and most searched.
• Tailor past experience. Even though you can go into more detail in your earlier experiences, try to tailor them to match your target position. Put the most relevant and identical bullet points higher in your experience descriptions.
• Show career progression. Whether on a resume or your LinkedIn profile, demonstrating career progression is important. Promotions within a position are great. But so is showing upward mobility from one position to the next. Try to show this upward mobility in your Experience section.
• Watch the language. Avoid using excessive adjectives that make your experience sound like fluff. Steer clear of buzzwords, jargon, and cliches that recruiters find so annoying.

Here’s a quick tip to check if your LinkedIn profile is using the keywords recruiters might search for when filling positions you’re targeting. It’s actually a trick recruiters use to scan profiles efficiently. Simply hold down Ctrl + F (or Command + F on a Mac), and a search bar will appear in your browser. Use it to type in keywords and see how often –and where –they show up in your profile.

Pick a keyword that recruiters might use in their searches, like “writer.” When you search for that keyword in your LinkedIn profile, it will highlight all the places it appears. This includes your skills section, your tagline, and even the taglines of people who wrote you recommendations. It’s an easy but effective way to check if your profile has enough of the right keywords to catch recruiters’ attention.

By the way, you might notice I’ve included two versions of “writer.” For example, I added “writing” along with my titles to show up in searches like “resume writing” as well as “resume writer.” This trick works best if it fits naturally into your profile. It shouldn’t look awkward or out of place. You’d be surprised how many job titles can benefit from this easy strategy!

Cover all your bases. Successful job hunting is all about strategy, and sometimes even the smallest details can make a big difference.

Your LinkedIn profile Education section

Just like your Experience section, your LinkedIn Education section lets you share more details. Use this space to include activities and groups you were part of in college, like clubs or associations. You can also add a short list of classes or topics related to the job you want, which helps include important keywords. Don’t forget to highlight special projects you worked on and any internships that helped you grow professionally.

Note: Adding your internship to your Experience section depends on where you are in your career and how it fits with your current goals. If the internship is highly relevant, it’s worth highlighting in that section. Even later in your career, you can still mention a really successful internship in your Education section—it can add value and help tell your professional story.

LinkedIn offers a place for you to add key skills picked up from each school you attended. So take advantage of this section to help you stand out, as well as be easier to find during a recruiter’s search.

Your LinkedIn profile Skills section

The Skills section on your LinkedIn profile isn’t just extra space, it’s an important feature, so use it wisely! Recruiters often look at this section to find and evaluate candidates, making it a key tool for connecting with the right opportunities.

“More employers are leaving behind college degree requirements and embracing a skills-based hiring approach that emphasizes strong work backgrounds, certifications, assessments, and endorsements. And soft skills are becoming a key focus of hiring managers, even over hard skills,” writes Lucas Mearian on Computerworld.com.

Use strategy when listing your skills

LinkedIn will automatically place the skills you listed after each job in your Experience section in the Skills section. And you can add as many as you want. However, it’s best to be strategic about the skills you add.

To figure out the best skills to add to your Skills section, start by looking at the required skills for one or two jobs you want. If the job is posted on LinkedIn, this is quick and simple. Here’s how to do it:

Find a job ad –for example, a “Content Writer” position –and use Ctrl + F (or Command + F on a Mac) to search for a key term like “content.” This will help you spot important qualifications or skills listed in the ad. Then, click on the section that shows all the required skills for the job. LinkedIn will highlight which skills on your profile match and which ones you’re missing.

When I tried this with my own profile for the “Content Writer” job, the results weren’t great. It was a clear reminder to update my profile and align my skills more closely with my target job!

As you can see, many of the skills listed on my LinkedIn profile didn’t match the target job example, especially “content,” which is a key keyword for the role. If I were serious about applying for this job, that mismatch would be a problem. Doing this exercise showed me what I need to update in my Skills section, so I added the right skills. It also helped me see which skills are the most important for the job.

From this list, I can take extra steps, like removing skills that aren’t relevant and rearranging the rest so the most important ones appear at the top. This helps make sure my profile matches what recruiters are looking for.

Skills Endorsements

Another way to improve your Skills section is by getting endorsements from your LinkedIn connections. People in your network can visit your profile and click on specific skills to endorse you. To make sure they can do this, check that your Endorsement settings are turned on.

Want to encourage people to endorse you? A great strategy is to visit their profiles and endorse their skills first. It’s a simple, proactive way to build mutual support within your network.

Your LinkedIn profile Recommendations section

Have you ever looked at someone’s LinkedIn profile and felt a little jealous of their amazing Recommendations section? Don’t worry—those glowing reviews didn’t just happen on their own. They took effort to get. The truth is, most people won’t think to write you a recommendation unless you ask them. Everyone’s busy, so even people who appreciate your work might need a small reminder to put it into words.

LinkedIn recommendations are very important. They’re like “customer reviews” for professionals—they give valuable proof that backs up your skills and shows your credibility.

Don Goodman and Jenna Arcand, on WorkItDaily.com, write, “Recommendations on LinkedIn are like doing a pre-check of your references. Recruiters want to see that you have other professionals in the field or industry vouching for your experiences, skills, and capabilities.”

Getting recommendations

Recommendations from supervisors, professors, clients, or employers are great additions to your LinkedIn profile. But don’t forget how valuable recommendations from coworkers, colleagues in other departments, or junior staff you’ve mentored can be. These endorsements give recruiters important insights into something they really care about: what you’re like as a coworker.

“Reach out to managers and team members you’ve collaborated with to see if they’ll leave a recommendation on your profile. You could even remind them of a few highlights of your working relationship to help them write it. Better yet, offer to write one for them first before asking them to return the favor,” writes Jacob Johnson for CodeAcademy.com.

Not all LinkedIn recommendations are the same. When it comes to recommendations, quality is more important than quantity. Having twenty endorsements might look impressive at first, but if they’re all generic comments like, “John Doe was great to work with, an asset to the team,” they won’t have much impact. Recommendations that are personal and specific are the ones that really stand out.

So target those LinkedIn recommendations as carefully as you would your job references. Seek people who meet the following criteria:

• Have good online reputations
• Have had actual professional experiences with you
• Write well
• Can say something substantive
• You would reciprocate
• Can offer something different from others

Tips for sending them a LinkedIn recommendation request:

• Timing: Right after completing a successful project together. Or, after a friendly interaction with them somewhere.
• Reciprocate: Write them a recommendation first, or offer to write them one.
• Make it personal: Don’t copy and paste your way down your connection list. Individualize each note by mentioning something about them, about the work you did together, or about something you appreciate about them.
• Show your presence by liking and commenting on their posts.

Wrap up

In Part I of this LinkedIn series, we covered the foundational steps to creating an exceptional job seeker profile. You learned how to craft a powerful tagline designed to catch the attention of recruiters and how to optimize your profile with keywords to enhance your visibility in candidate searches.

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