Location is the most-used filter in recruiter search — nearly every sourcing workflow starts by narrowing to a metro area or country — so the location on your profile decides which markets can find you at all. Set it to the metro area where you want to be hired: your current one normally, and your destination once a relocation is certain and defensible.
Recruiters overwhelmingly source within a geography: a Dubai search, a London search, a Germany search. The location field on your profile — a structured value tied to LinkedIn's location taxonomy — is what those filters match. Choose the broadest honest option that covers your job market: LinkedIn generally offers metro-area values, and the metro area typically appears in more searches than a small suburb, because recruiters filter by the metro.
Location also drives the job recommendations LinkedIn shows you and the salary and market data it surfaces. A stale location — the city you left last year — skews everything downstream of it.
If you are actively targeting another city or country, understand the tradeoff: with your current location set, the destination's recruiters mostly never see you; with the destination set, you appear in their searches but must be ready to explain the discrepancy with your current role's location — which is normal and survivable when the move is real ('relocating to Dubai in November; right to work secured'). The common practice among serious relocators is to set the destination location once the move is definite, and say so plainly in the About and Open to Work settings.
Whatever you choose, configure Open to Work's locations to include the destination — recruiters filtering by candidates open to a location can find you that way even before you change the profile field.
Fully remote job seekers still need a location: employment law, payroll, and time zones make 'remote' a location-constrained category, and recruiters for remote roles filter by country or region of residence. Set your real location, and use Open to Work to flag remote as a workplace type you accept. Setting a fake hub-city location to game searches backfires at the first 'so you're based in...?' question.
For everyone, keep the field consistent with your resume header. Location is one of the first fields a screener compares across the two documents, and an unexplained mismatch — resume says Riyadh, profile says Berlin — costs credibility that a one-line explanation would have preserved.
Once the move is definite, many relocators do — it is the only way to appear in the destination's recruiter searches. Pair it with a plain statement of the move and timing in your About, and set Open to Work locations to match, so the discrepancy with your current employer's location answers itself.
Your real one. Remote roles are still filtered by country or region for legal and payroll reasons, so an honest location plus remote listed as an accepted workplace type in Open to Work covers the searches that matter.
The metro area, generally. Recruiters filter at metro granularity, and the broader value keeps you inside every search across the region. A small suburb's name matches fewer searches and adds no information a recruiter needs at the screening stage.
Check your own profile against this advice - the free LinkedIn score shows what recruiters' search filters actually see.
