Each LinkedIn experience entry has four working parts: a title recruiters actually search, a description that names what you did with the tools you used, optional media that proves it, and skills tagged to the role. The title field is the heaviest lever — it feeds recruiter title filters directly — and the description is your keyword surface for everything the title leaves out.
Recruiter search runs hard filters on the job title field, so the title you enter should be the market's name for your job, not your employer's internal one. 'Member of Technical Staff', 'Consultant II', and 'Associate' match almost nothing; 'Software Engineer', 'Data Analyst', and 'Project Manager' match everything relevant. If your internal title is meaningfully different, use the market title and put the internal one in the description — that keeps you honest and searchable at once.
Keep dates accurate to the month, because LinkedIn derives your years-of-experience from them and recruiters filter on that too. If you were promoted within a company, list the roles as separate positions under the same employer — LinkedIn groups them visually, your progression becomes visible, and each title gets its own search entry.
An empty description wastes the role's entire keyword surface. Two to four sentences or three to five short bullet-style lines is the sweet spot: what you owned, what changed because of you, and the tools and methods involved — named plainly, because those nouns are what keyword search matches. 'Led migration of billing to event-driven architecture on Kafka and AWS, cutting invoice errors 30%' carries five searchable terms and one result.
Do not paste your entire resume bullet list into each role. The profile is a public summary read in a browser, not a tailored application document; give it the highlights and the vocabulary, and keep the exhaustive version for the resume you tailor per job. Every claim on the profile must match the resume — recruiters do compare, and date or title mismatches between the two read as carelessness at best.
Each experience entry accepts media attachments — links, documents, images, videos. Use them where proof exists: a product page, a published article, a talk recording, a portfolio piece. One strong attachment per role beats five weak ones. Never attach anything confidential; assume every attachment is public forever.
LinkedIn also lets you tag skills to each position. Do it — those associations tell both the search system and human readers where each skill was actually exercised, which is more convincing than a bare skill list. When you add a new role, tagging its skills at creation time takes seconds; retrofitting years later never happens.
Match the market's name for the job, not the internal label, whenever the two differ. 'Software Engineer' will be found; 'Member of Technical Staff' will not. State the internal title inside the description if you want the record complete.
Two to four sentences or a handful of short lines. Enough to carry your key tools, scope, and one or two outcomes; less than the full bullet list on your resume. Empty descriptions cost you keyword coverage; full resume dumps cost you readability.
Add each role as a separate position under the same company with its own dates. LinkedIn nests them into one company block, which displays your progression clearly and gives every title its own entry in recruiter search.
Check your own profile against this advice - the free LinkedIn score shows what recruiters' search filters actually see.
