The Featured section is a pinboard near the top of your profile that holds posts, articles, external links, and uploaded media — and its job is proof. Pin two to five items that demonstrate the claim your headline makes: a shipped product, a published piece, a talk, a portfolio. Order them so the strongest evidence sits first, because most visitors only see the first cards without scrolling.
Everything above Featured on your profile is assertion: headline, About, titles. Featured is where assertion becomes artifact. A hiring manager who reads 'built the pricing engine' in your About and then sees the product's launch page pinned below it has had the claim corroborated without leaving your profile. That corroboration is the section's entire value — it is not a scrapbook.
The section accepts four content types: your own LinkedIn posts, your LinkedIn articles, external links with a preview card, and uploaded media such as PDFs and images. External links are usually the workhorse — product pages, press, published writing, portfolio pieces, conference talk recordings.
Curate hard: two to five items. Featured renders as horizontal cards and most visitors never swipe past the first two, so a ten-item Featured section is really a two-item section with clutter. Lead with the piece of evidence most relevant to the job you want next — not your most impressive item in absolute terms. A data engineer targeting streaming roles should pin the Kafka talk first even if their most-liked post was about careers.
Give each item a deliberate title and description when LinkedIn lets you edit them; the auto-generated preview text is often truncated or wrong. And check what the preview card actually shows — a broken thumbnail or a login-walled link makes the section worse than empty. Test every link logged out.
Featured decays quietly: companies take pages down, posts age, links rot. Click through your pinned items every quarter. Replace the pinned post celebrating a work anniversary — engagement bait ages terribly — with anything that shows work. If you have genuinely nothing to pin yet, leave the section off rather than pinning filler; an empty section is invisible, weak filler is not.
One caution for job seekers under confidentiality obligations: never pin internal documents, dashboards, or screenshots of employer systems. If your best work is confidential, pin the public shadow of it — a talk about the approach, a sanitized case study, or a post explaining the problem class.
Four types of content: your own posts, your LinkedIn articles, external links (rendered as preview cards), and uploaded media like PDFs or images. External links to shipped work, publications, and talks tend to be the most persuasive.
Two to five. The section displays as cards and most visitors only see the first couple without scrolling, so ruthless curation beats volume. Put the item most relevant to your target role first.
Generally no. A public resume PDF goes stale the moment you update the real one, exposes your phone and email to scrapers, and removes your ability to tailor per application. Pin evidence of work instead, and send the current resume per application.
Apply this to your own profile: the free LinkedIn score maps every gap, and a paid fix run writes the replacement text for you.
