Nobody reads your profile the way you wrote it.
You wrote it top to bottom, as a record of where you have worked. They read it in about ten seconds, in one glance, while deciding whether replying to you is worth their time. They are not evaluating your career. They are answering one question: is this person going to be useful to me.
That is not a CV question. It is a sales page question. And a sales page has a job that a CV does not: it sells a specific outcome, to a specific person, with a clear next action.
I score profiles against ten parameters. This piece is about the first four, because they are the ones a buyer sees before deciding whether to scroll at all.
The photo is a trust decision, not a formality
A buyer decides something about you from the photo before reading a word. The bar is lower than people fear and higher than most profiles clear.
- Taken in the last two years
- Face filling roughly 80 percent of the frame
- Clean background, nothing competing for attention
- An expression that reads as a person you would do business with
The common failures are not vanity failures. They are distance failures. A photo where your face occupies a fifth of the frame reads as someone hiding, whatever the quality of the camera. Cropped from a group shot, it reads as someone who could not be bothered.
A profile photo is not asking whether you are photogenic. It is asking whether you look like the person who solves this problem.
The banner is the largest piece of free advertising you own
Most banners are blank, a default gradient, or a company logo floating in space. That is the single biggest waste of space on the platform: 1584 by 396 pixels, at the top of the page, seen by everyone who lands there, saying nothing.
A banner that works carries three things:
- A pitch in ten words or fewer. Often better as a question, because a question is harder to skim past than a statement
- Proof. Two or three recognisable logos, a number you can defend, a line from a client
- One instruction. What you want them to do next, in plain words
Three elements, one image. If you have a designer, this is the brief. If you do not, this is a job AI does well in an afternoon.
The tagline field is free keywords nobody uses
The small field next to your name follows you everywhere: into DMs, into comment threads, into every connection request. Most people leave it empty, and the ones who fill it use it for pronouns alone.
Two to four words of positioning. "Corporate Gifting Expert." "AI and LinkedIn Coach." It costs nothing and it repeats itself hundreds of times a week in places your headline never reaches.
The headline is where the CV habit does the most damage
This is the most-read text on your profile and the place where people write the least useful thing available to them, which is their job title.
"Founder at Something Ltd" tells a buyer what you are called. It does not tell them what happens if they hire you.
The structure that works:
I help [who] achieve [specific result] using [method] | [proof] | [soft call to action]
Read that back against your own headline and check for three things. Is there a measurable outcome, not an adjective. Is there proof, meaning a number you could be challenged on. Is there an instruction, something concrete they can act on now.
You have 220 characters. Every word should be doing work. Pipes help, because nobody reads a headline as a sentence, they scan it in fragments.
What to do this week
Open your profile on a phone, not a laptop, because that is where most people will see it. Look at what is visible before the first scroll. That is your photo, your banner, your tagline, your headline, and nothing else.
Then ask the only question that matters: if a stranger with your exact problem saw only this, would they reply to you?
If the honest answer is no, the fix is not more content. It is these four fields.
The remaining six parameters, the About section, the featured link, the experience section and the rest, are worth as much again. But they are all downstream of whether anyone stayed long enough to reach them.