You can find out whether your LinkedIn profile is findable for the jobs you want in about ten minutes, with your profile open in one tab and three job postings open in the others. No tool, no coach. You read your profile the way a recruiter's search reads it, which isn't how you read it.
Here's the difference. You read your profile top to bottom, like a story. The search reads a few specific fields, ignores the rest, and reads those fields against the words in a job posting. So your profile is findable, or it isn't, for specific roles, never in general, and the check has to start with the roles.
Start with three postings, not your profile (two minutes)
Open three postings for jobs you'd take. Live now, with a title you want. If you've gotten to late rounds for a few roles, use those; you were already the right shape for them. One posting is the wrong test, because one company's wording is noise, and in the data I published in September, 44% of runs pasted a single job. Three is where the repeats show.
Write down two things. The title the postings use, in their words. And the five skills or capabilities that appear in at least two of the three. That's your target language, and the rest of the check is your profile against it. If the three postings use three different titles, take the one that shows up most. The longer method for pulling keywords from the jobs you want is its own piece, for later.
Read your headline against that title (two minutes)
Read your headline against the title you wrote down. Wrong looks like one of these: your internal title, a tagline about helping brands grow, a row of adjectives separated by pipes, the title from your old field, or five titles you'd accept strung together with slashes. The common thread is that the title a recruiter would type isn't in there as a phrase.
This fails more than anything on the profile except Skills. In the run log from the past five weeks, 47% of runs had a critical headline gap. What to do: put the market-standard title first, as a phrase, then one or two of the specialties that repeated across your postings. Everything else in the headline is optional.
Read the title on your current role by itself (two minutes)
Scroll to Experience and read the title field on your current role by itself. Wrong looks like a title only your company would recognize ("Marketing Manager III," "Growth Pod Lead"), a title a level below the roles you're after because that's what HR filed you under, or a title that matches your headline in spirit and in no actual words.
Recruiter's title filter reads this field. In 56% of runs, the market-standard title wasn't in the headline or here, and the grade gets capped when it's missing. What to do: keep the official title and put the standard version beside it in the same field, where it's true. Then check that this field and the headline agree. They're two places the same search reads, and fixing one is half a fix.
Check your Skills against the five that repeat (three minutes)
Three minutes here, because this is the part that fails most. Skills got flagged in 86% of runs over the past five weeks (90% when a Skills section was pasted at all), and the Skills dimension scored a median of 65 out of 100 while everything else scored around 80.
Open your Skills section and look for the five skills you wrote down. Wrong looks like: fewer than three of the five are there; the top three on display are things you did a decade ago; the list is 40 items long and the five you need are at the bottom; or the five are there and nothing in your Experience mentions them. That last one counts because the skills filter also reads skill language in your roles, so a skill with no bullet behind it is a weaker signal than one your work history backs up.
What to do: add the missing ones that are honestly yours, move the three that matter most to the top, and write the bullet that proves each one under the role where you did the work.
The two setup fields search filters on (one minute)
Two quick ones. Your location, set to where the roles you want are being filtered for, because location is a pass-or-fail filter. And Open to Work, if it's on: LinkedIn says the titles and locations in it affect whether you appear in searches, so they should be the title you wrote down in minute one. If you typed something in there a year ago, it's a year stale.
The rest of the setup side, endorsements, verification, staying active, is in the LinkedIn findability skill. None of it is text, so it isn't part of this check.
Scoring yourself
Count the fields that failed. In the data I published in September, 41% of runs scored under 80 out of 100 against jobs the person chose themselves, so a failure or two is the normal result, not a bad one. Two failures means start with the headline and Skills, because those are the two that fail most in the data. Four failures doesn't mean a rebuild. It's still a handful of fields, in the order above, and most of it is an hour's work.
Then check the outside view
Everything above is the inside view. The outside view is your Search Appearances. Click Me, then View profile, scroll to Analytics, click Search appearances, and look at the job titles you were found for. If those titles look like the job you want, the fields are working, whatever the total says. If they look like your old job, or someone else's job, you've just confirmed the check from the other side. Make the changes, wait two to four weeks, and look again. What search appearances actually mean covers how to read that number without fooling yourself.
It's hard to be objective about your own headline, which is why the fast version exists: paste your profile and the same three postings into JobSearchDx. It runs the comparison across these fields in about two minutes, scores it, and names the biggest gap. The grade and your first fix are free.