I have reviewed hundreds of LinkedIn profiles as a hiring manager. Most of them have the same fixable problems. Not career ending mistakes, just small issues that get you filtered out before anyone reads a word of your experience.

The hardest part of a job search is not the interview. It is getting to one. You are competing against thousands of applicants, many of whom are being auto-filtered by ATS systems or dismissed in a ten-second recruiter scan. These fixes are how you stop being one of them.

#Treat your job search like personal SEO

Recruiters do not browse LinkedIn like you do. They search it. They type in a skill, a title, a tool, and filter by location and seniority. If your profile does not show up in those searches, you do not exist to them, no matter how qualified you are.

Your profile is not a resume. It is a document that needs to be findable. Every section, headline, about, job titles and skills, is an opportunity to include the words recruiters are actually searching for. Think about what someone would type to find someone like you, and make sure those words are there.

#Get a professional photo

No photo, a blurry photo, a group shot where someone cropped out the person next to you, a photo from a wedding with a drink in hand. These 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 is enough. Dress for the job you want. Make it easy for someone to connect a face to a name.

#Use a banner that does work

The default LinkedIn banner is a generic blue gradient. Leaving it there is a missed opportunity.

A good banner tells people what you do and where you are focused 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 do not need to be a designer. Canva has templates you can update in five minutes.

#Use related keywords together, not separately

Recruiters often search for a broad category term or a specific tool in the same search. If your profile only has one of them, you miss both.

A recruiter might search “service mesh” or “Istio” but not both. If your profile only mentions one, you may not come up. The same goes for:

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

Go through your profile and make sure you are using both the category term and the specific tool names together, in context, not just buried in a skills section that no one reads carefully.

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

Most people either skip this step or use AI in a way that spits out useless advice like “add more action verbs and quantify your achievements.” That advice has existed for decades.

What works is giving AI the job description and your LinkedIn profile text then telling it to act as a skeptical recruiter doing a 30-second first pass, not 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 matters. “Skeptical recruiter doing a first pass” gets you critical, useful output. “Career coach” gets you encouragement and generic suggestions.

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 gets you past the filter. The second tells you if you get the offer. Fix the filter problems first. They are the ones killing most applications before anyone with real authority sees your name.

#Do not let AI make you invisible

AI has made resumes worse, not better.

A recruiter reviewing 100 applications right now will tell you they all look the same. Same bullet structure, same action verbs, same vague achievement framing, same tone. They were all generated by feeding a job description into the same tools. The result is not a polished resume, it is a resume that disappears into a pile of identical ones. When a recruiter cannot 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. Do not let it replace your voice. The things that make you different from the next person with a similar title, the specific problems you solved, the approaches you took, the context that makes your experience meaningful, those require actual thought. Engineering is a creative discipline. Your resume should reflect that.

The same goes for application questions, many 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.” These are designed to find out whether you have actually done the thing.

Recruiters know this, and they are now using AI to evaluate the responses they get. They attach the resume, the job description, and your answer to a model and ask whether it looks AI-generated. If it does the application is rejected. Not maybe, rejected.

If you have real experience, write about it in your own words. Being specific is the only thing that reads as human, and human is what gets you the call.

None of this replaces doing good work or having real experience. But good work that never gets seen does not get you interviews. Fix your profile, get to the conversation, and let the actual substance speak for itself.