The LinkedIn Features That Actually Grow Your Brand (And One That Doesn’t)
Your LinkedIn Profile Is Losing You, Candidates. Here's What to Fix.
Recruiters judge profiles in seconds. So do candidates judge you back.
Most HR professionals obsess over evaluating other people's LinkedIn presence while completely neglecting their own. The irony is painful. You know exactly what a weak profile looks like — unclear headline, generic About section, that sad gray default background that says "I set this up in 2014 and never came back."
So let's fix that.
The features worth your time (and one that isn't)
Before anything else: your Headline, About section, and headshot need to actually work. These are non-negotiable. If someone lands on your profile and can't immediately understand who you are and why they should care, everything else is decoration.
Once those are solid, here's where to focus:
Featured. Barely anyone uses this. Which means using it well makes you look dramatically more intentional than your peers. Drop a short video, a client testimonial screenshot, or a piece of press. It sits near the top of your profile and takes up more visual space than your cover image. Use it.
Recommendations. You spend your career assessing talent. Writing a sharp, specific recommendation for someone costs you ten minutes and signals something most recruiters never bother to signal: generosity. It's a brand attribute. Collect it.
Your cover image. You have 1584 x 396 pixels of prime real estate sitting behind your headshot, and most of you are leaving it as the LinkedIn default. That's the equivalent of showing up to a job fair with a blank name badge. Put something there — a tagline, a philosophy, an image that tells people what you're about.
Newsletters. Your regular posts reach maybe 5–10% of your followers on a good day. A newsletter goes directly to the inboxes of people who opted in. If you're sharing anything worth reading, this is where it belongs.
Groups? Skip them. They used to be useful. Now they're mostly people shouting into the void about their own services. Not worth your attention.
The actual point
LinkedIn isn't just where candidates get evaluated. It's where you get evaluated, too — by candidates deciding whether they trust you, by peers deciding whether to refer business, by hiring managers deciding whether you're worth a conversation.
Use the features that make your value obvious. Drop the ones that don't. And for the love of all things professional, change that default background.