LinkedIn contact info: what to expose and to whom
Your LinkedIn contact info section should carry a professional email, your portfolio or personal site, and your custom profile URL — and almost never your phone number or street address. Email visibility is adjustable in settings from 'only visible to me' up to 'anyone on LinkedIn'; job seekers usually want at least connections to see it, because a recruiter who cannot reach you moves to the next result.
Updated September 2, 2026
The contact info panel — behind the 'Contact info' link near the top of your profile — holds your profile URL, websites, email, phone, address, birthday, and instant messenger handles. Of these, three earn their place for almost everyone: the custom profile URL, up to three website links (portfolio, personal site, company page), and an email address. Phone, address, and birthday should generally stay empty or private; LinkedIn is public infrastructure, and scrapers harvest exactly these fields.
Use the website slots deliberately. LinkedIn lets you label links, and a labeled 'Portfolio' or 'Case studies' link gets clicked where a bare URL does not. Point links at pages that are alive — a dead portfolio link is worse than none.
Who can see your email is controlled in Settings under visibility of your email address, with levels from only-you through 1st-degree connections up to anyone on LinkedIn. The default is conservative. If you are job hunting, consider opening it to at least your connections — recruiters and hiring managers who want to move fast often prefer email over InMail, and an unreachable candidate is a skippable one.
Use an email you actually check and that looks professional — a firstname.lastname address, not the handle you made in school. Never use your current work email: you lose it the day you leave, and its presence on your profile makes every job-search interaction visible to whoever administers your employer's mail.
Once a year, audit the loop: open your profile logged out, view it as a stranger would, and ask how a motivated recruiter would contact you. If the answer is 'InMail only, and only if they pay for it', you have added friction exactly where you want none. The fixes are cheap — visible email for connections, an up-to-date website link, and Open to Work configured so recruiters see availability.
Check the section after every job change. Contact info rots quietly: old work emails, dead portfolio domains, a company link pointing at an employer from two jobs ago. Each stale entry is a small signal that the profile — and maybe the candidate — is not current.
Usually no. Public phone fields get scraped for spam, and legitimate recruiters will happily start with a message or email. If a specific situation demands it, add it temporarily and remove it after.
Whatever your setting allows — the visibility control ranges from only you, through your 1st-degree connections, up to anyone on LinkedIn. Job seekers generally benefit from letting at least connections see it, so interested recruiters can reach you outside the platform.
No. Register and display a personal, professional-looking address. Work email disappears when you change jobs — potentially locking you out of the account — and using it for a job search routes your search through your employer's mail system.
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