I have reviewed hundreds of LinkedIn profiles as a hiring manager, and most of them have the same fixable problems. They usually aren’t career-ending mistakes, just small things that get you filtered out before anyone reads a word of your experience.

In my experience the hardest part of a job search is getting to the interview in the first place. You are competing against thousands of applicants, and a lot of them get auto-filtered by an ATS or dismissed in a ten-second recruiter scan. These fixes are how you avoid being one of them.

#Treat your job search like personal SEO

Recruiters don’t browse LinkedIn the way you do. They search it, typing in a skill, a title, or a tool and filtering by location and seniority. If your profile doesn’t show up in those searches, they will never see it, no matter how qualified you are.

So think of your profile less like a resume and more like something that needs to be findable. Every section (headline, about, job titles, and skills) is a chance to include the words recruiters are actually searching for. Think about what someone would type to find a person like you, and make sure those words are there.

#Get a professional photo

No photo, a blurry photo, a group shot where you cropped out the person next to you, or a wedding photo with a drink in your hand all send the wrong message before anyone reads your name.

You don’t need a studio. A phone camera, decent light near a window, and a clean background are enough. Dress for the job you want, and make it easy for someone to connect a face to a name.

#Use a banner that does some work

The default LinkedIn banner is a generic blue gradient, and leaving it there wastes some of the most visible space on your profile.

A good banner tells people what you do and what you focus on without them having to read anything. If you are a platform engineer focused on Kubernetes and developer experience, that should be obvious from the banner alone. You don’t need to be a designer either. Canva has templates you can update in five minutes.

#Use related keywords together

Recruiters often search for either a broad category or a specific tool. A recruiter might search “service mesh” or “Istio” but not both, and if your profile only mentions one, you may not come up. The same goes for pairs like:

• “container orchestration” / “Kubernetes”
• “CI/CD” / “GitHub Actions”
• “observability” / “Prometheus”
• and dozens of other common pairs

Go through your profile and use both the category and the specific tool together, in context, instead of burying them in a skills section that nobody reads carefully.

#Use AI to check your profile against the actual job posting

Most people either skip this or use AI in a way that spits out useless advice like “add more action verbs and quantify your achievements,” which has been the standard advice for decades.

What works better is giving the AI the job description and your LinkedIn profile text, then telling it to act as a skeptical recruiter doing a 30-second first pass instead of a writing coach.

Here is a prompt to try:

You are a recruiter at [company]. You receive 400 applications for this role and have 30 seconds per profile to decide who moves forward. Below is the job description and a candidate’s LinkedIn profile. Identify the top 3 reasons this candidate would be filtered out before a human reads the full profile. Then separately identify what would need to change to move them from the reject pile to the top 20%.

Job description: [paste job description]

LinkedIn profile: [paste your headline, about section, and most recent 2-3 roles]

How you frame the prompt makes a big difference. Asking for a “skeptical recruiter doing a first pass” gets you critical, useful feedback, while asking for a “career coach” gets you encouragement and generic suggestions.

Then run a second pass with this one:

You are the hiring manager for this role, not the recruiter. You’ve already seen this candidate’s resume. You are looking at their LinkedIn to understand their career and whether they have been working at the level this role requires. What do you like? What gives you pause?

The first prompt helps you get past the filter, and the second tells you whether you would get the offer. Fix the filter problems first, because those are what kill most applications before anyone with real authority sees your name.

#Don’t let AI make you invisible

I think AI has made resumes worse.

Ask any recruiter reviewing 100 applications right now and they will tell you they all look the same: the same bullet structure, the same action verbs, the same vague achievements, the same tone. That is what happens when everyone feeds a job description into the same tools. You end up with a resume that disappears into a pile of identical ones, and when a recruiter can’t tell one candidate from the next, they move on.

Use AI to clean up your writing, catch inconsistencies, and check your profile against job descriptions, but don’t let it replace your voice. What makes you different from the next person with a similar title is the specific problems you solved, the approaches you took, and the context around your work, and that takes actual thought to write down. Engineering is a creative job, and your resume should show that.

The same goes for application questions. A lot of companies now ask open-ended questions like “describe a time you resolved a significant technical problem” or “how did you approach building alignment across teams” to find out whether you have actually done the thing.

Recruiters know people are using AI to answer these, and they are using AI to check. They give a model the resume, the job description, and your answer and ask whether it looks AI-generated, and if it does, the application gets rejected.

If you have real experience, write about it in your own words. Specific details are what make an answer read like a person wrote it, and that is what gets you the call.

None of this replaces doing good work or having real experience, but good work that nobody sees won’t get you interviews. Fix your profile so you get to the conversation, and then let your actual experience do the talking.