Recruiters do not browse, they search. Set up your headline, About section, and skills so their searches land on you.
The part people miss about LinkedIn: recruiters are not scrolling a feed hoping you drift past. They are inside a search tool, typing a job title, two or three skills, and a city, and they read the first page of results. Your profile is a search result. Write it like one.
Treat the headline like the title tag it is
The default headline is just your job title, which wastes the single most-read line on your profile. It shows in every search result and beside every comment you leave. Load it up: role first, then the skills you want to be found for. "Financial Analyst | FP&A, Excel modeling, Power BI | turning forecasts into decisions" pulls far more weight than "Financial Analyst at Acme."
Write the About section for two readers at once
A human reads it, and so does a search index. Open with one plain sentence about what you do and who you help, then fold in the terms a recruiter would type without tipping into keyword salad.
The difference is night and day. Compare "Experienced professional passionate about driving results" with "I help B2B SaaS teams turn free trials into paying customers; over six years I've run onboarding, lifecycle email, and pricing tests that pushed activation up 20 to 40%." The first could be anybody. The second names the work, the industry, and the numbers a recruiter is searching for. Keep it first person, short paragraphs, and end on the kind of role you want next.
What recruiters actually filter on
When a recruiter opens LinkedIn Recruiter, they narrow the pool by current and past job titles, specific skills, location and radius, and years of experience, often plus an industry or a past employer. So make those fields legible: put the target title in your headline and your latest role, list skills by the names people actually search, set your location, and keep your dates complete so the experience math adds up. If a filter cannot read it, that filter quietly leaves you out.
Fill the skills, then prove them
LinkedIn gives you a long list of skill slots and recruiters filter on them, so use the slots, leading with whatever shows up in the jobs you want. Then make sure those same skills appear down in your experience, with a number attached wherever you can manage one. A skill claimed at the top and backed up below reads completely differently from a skill sitting alone in a list.
Flip the switches they filter on
Turn on "Open to work" with visibility limited to recruiters if you are still employed. Add your location and the titles you are targeting. Use a real photo. Complete profiles outrank thin ones, and a profile with no photo or no current role slides quietly down the results.
Stay a little visible
You do not need to post essays. A profile that leaves a thoughtful comment once or twice a week reads as current and surfaces more often than one that has not moved in a year. A small amount of activity does a lot.
Set this up once and you stop chasing roles and start getting messaged about them. The Cover Letter & LinkedIn Profile Kit hands you the headline and About formulas, the keywords recruiters actually search, and a short refresh checklist so your resume and profile finally tell one story. There is more in the Career & Job Search collection.