Recruiter search on LinkedIn reads a handful of fields, and the same ones keep failing. I can see this because the findability check I built logs what it flags on every run, and over the past five weeks the pattern hasn't changed. The Skills section is the weakest part of almost every profile. And more than half the time, the title a recruiter would type isn't anywhere the title filter looks.
Here's what to change, in the order the data says it fails. The mechanics of how Recruiter works are their own piece, how recruiters find candidates on LinkedIn, and I'm going to lean on that instead of re-explaining it.
What a recruiter's search actually reads
Three things at once. Filters, which are pass or fail: job title, location, skills, company, seniority. Miss a filter and you're out of the results entirely. Keyword and Boolean search, which reads the text on your profile. And AI-assisted search, where a recruiter pastes a job description and LinkedIn turns it into those same filters and keywords.
The practical consequence is that a few unglamorous fields do most of the work. The title field on each job in your Experience feeds the title filter. The Skills section, plus skill language anywhere else on the profile, feeds the skills filter. Your headline gets read by keyword search and by the human scanning the result list. Your About is text too, and keyword search reads it, but it's written for the person who clicks.
Between September 27 and November 1, the check graded 293 runs on one scoring version. (A run is one graded comparison. One person can run it several times, and a few of those runs are my own tests.) 22% graded D or F. Another 30% landed in the C range. Nothing about those profiles would look broken to a person reading them. They don't carry the language of the jobs the person pasted in, and a filter can't see what isn't there.
Fix the Skills section first, because it fails most
Skills got flagged Important or Critical in 86% of runs. When the person pasted a Skills section at all, 90%. The Skills dimension scored a median of 65 out of 100, and every other dimension scored around 80. Nothing else on the profile is close.
I think what's actually happening is that nobody treats the Skills list as writing. It's whatever LinkedIn suggested when you set up the profile, plus whatever people endorsed you for in 2019. Then recruiters filter on it.
The fix is twenty minutes. Pull three to five real postings for jobs you'd take and write down the skills that repeat, the ones that show up in three postings out of four. The method is in LinkedIn keywords for recruiter search. Then open your Skills section and compare. Add the repeating skills that are honestly yours. Move the three that matter most to the top. And go find the bullet in your Experience that proves each one, because the skills filter also reads skill language in your roles, and a skill with a bullet behind it beats a skill sitting alone in a list.
What you don't do is add the ones you haven't got. A posting that wants something you've never done is a fit question. Leave it.
Put the market-standard title where the title filter reads it
In 56% of runs, the title recruiters would type for the target roles wasn't in the headline or the current job title. The check caps the grade when that happens, because no amount of good writing elsewhere gets you past a title filter you don't match.
This one has two parts, and people fix one. The headline is the part everyone knows about, and it was a critical gap in 47% of runs. The current job title is the part almost nobody touches. It got flagged in 40% of runs, and in 13% it was critical. The title filter reads the title field on each job in your Experience, so a headline that says "Product Marketing Director" sitting above a current role titled "Marketing Lead, Growth Pod" is half fixed.
The pattern I see most is the org-chart title. Companies invent titles. "Marketing Manager III." "Senior Brand Strategist, Tier 2." "Growth Lead," when the work is lifecycle marketing. Each one means something inside one building. Translate it. Keep the official title if you want and put the market-standard version beside it, so the field reads "Growth Lead (Lifecycle Marketing Manager)." That's accurate. Inflating your level is where it stops being accurate, and that line is the whole rule.
I had a version of this problem, and I was findable the entire time. Recruiters reached out steadily, for demand gen roles (hands-on paid media has never been my work), for manager roles a couple of levels down, for CMO roles I was never going to win. The roles I actually got to the final round for had titles all over the place, lifecycle, product marketing, engagement, growth, with the same work underneath. The title recruiters would type for that work wasn't on my profile until I worked backward from the postings and put it there. What I changed is in You're Tailoring the Wrong Document.
Rewrite the bullets under your current role
Keyword search reads the whole profile, and AI search infers from evidence, so the role at the top of your Experience is working for you or against you. If the bullets describe the work in your last company's vocabulary, the match isn't visible. Rewrite the first three bullets of the current role in the words the postings use, wherever the work honestly supports it. A role from 2018 can stay as it is.
What about the About section and Open to Work
Your About is written for the human who clicks, and the first two lines are all most people see before "see more," so the shape of the work you want goes there, up top. Open to Work, if you turn it on, takes the titles and locations you want to be found for, and LinkedIn says it affects whether you appear in searches. Fill it in with the same market-standard title. The non-text side, verification, endorsements, staying active, is in the LinkedIn findability skill.
How you'll know it worked
Don't trust the rewrite. Note your search appearances before you change anything, and the job titles you were found for. Make the changes. Wait two to four weeks, because LinkedIn's data refreshes slowly and a few days of it is noise. Then check whether the titles you're found for shifted toward the jobs you want. The total going up means nothing on its own. Search appearances only count when they're the right searches.
If you'd rather have the gaps named for your specific postings than hunt for them, paste your profile and the jobs into JobSearchDx. It grades the same fields above and names the biggest one. The grade and your first fix are free.