8 Mistakes People Make on LinkedIn

1. No photo, or a poor one

A profile without a face reads as abandoned. Use one current, well-lit shot, dressed as you would be for the job you want. A cropped photo from a wedding is not a professional headshot, and it looks like what it is.

2. Sending the default connection request

“I’d like to add you to my professional network” tells the recipient nothing, including why you are worth accepting. Two sentences saying where you know them from, or what prompted the request, is the difference between a connection and an ignored notification.

3. Leaving unexplained gaps

LinkedIn presents your history as a continuous timeline, so a missing year reads as something withheld in a way it would not on a resume. Account for the time — a contract, a sabbatical, a company that no longer exists — but a single line is enough. This is not licence to list every job you have ever held. See point 8.

4. Writing about yourself in the third person

“Jane is a results-driven leader who…” is a strange choice on a platform built around a first-person account of your own career. Write as yourself. Keep the third person for the conference programme.

5. Leaving the About section empty

The About section — LinkedIn’s old “Summary” — runs to 2,600 characters, of which roughly the first 300 show before a reader has to click “See more”. That is the space to say what you are for, in your own words. It is the LinkedIn counterpart to the executive profile that opens your resume, with considerably more room than the four to six lines a resume allows. Leave it blank and a reader assembles your story from job titles alone, and assembles it wrong.

6. Not participating

A profile that never comments, never joins a group and never posts is a filing-cabinet entry. You do not need to publish essays — reacting to and commenting on other people’s work is enough to keep you visible to the people who already know you. What you do not need is to chase whatever the platform is currently rewarding: most LinkedIn trends do not matter.

7. Ignoring the visibility settings

Two settings are worth finding before you start rewriting. Under Settings & Privacy → Visibility → Visibility of your LinkedIn activity, turn off “Share profile updates with your network”, so your current employer is not notified of every edit you make. Under Visibility → Profile viewing options, Private mode lets you look at companies and hiring managers without leaving your name in their notifications — at the cost of seeing who has looked at you.

8. Trying to be all things

A profile listing every qualification and every industry you have touched is not comprehensive — it is unreadable, and it leaves the reader to work out which one you actually want. Pick the thing you want to be hired for and cut what does not serve it. Then read the profile once as a stranger would: at the end of it, could you say in a sentence what this person does?

What has changed in 2026

Since 2025, recruiter searches on LinkedIn have increasingly been run by LinkedIn’s own AI, which reads your whole profile rather than just your job title. A profile last touched the week you started your current role is now working against you. Five more things to fix:

A headline that is just your job title

“Chief Financial Officer at [Company]” is what LinkedIn writes for you, and the headline carries a lot of weight in search. You have 220 characters. Say what you lead, in which sector and at what scale.

Duties instead of results

A search partner already knows what a COO does. They want to know what changed because you were there. Open every role with an outcome and a number: revenue, margin, headcount, EBITDA. If exact figures are confidential, give the order of magnitude.

A skills list that has not moved since 2018

Skills feed straight into recruiter search filters. Cut the list to the fifteen or twenty that describe the role you want next, and pin the top three.

Building your network only when you need it

Recruiter Lite, used by many smaller recruiters, only searches their first to third-degree network. If your network is small, you do not appear, however good the profile is. Connect steadily, with a line of context, rather than sending two hundred requests in the week after a redundancy.

Announcing your search to the wrong people

Leave the green “Open to Work” frame alone while you are employed: it tells your board, your team and your competitors. The “Recruiters only” setting does the useful part without the announcement, although LinkedIn can’t guarantee that recruiters at your own employer won’t see it.

Two things that take five minutes

Get identity-verified. It is free, done in the LinkedIn app with a chipped passport and a selfie, and LinkedIn highlights verified applicants to recruiters when you apply. Then claim a clean custom URL (linkedin.com/in/yourname) for your CV and email signature, and check that the profile tells the same story, with the same dates and numbers, as your CV.

Sound complicated?

We write executive LinkedIn profiles for a living. If you would rather not do the above yourself, that is what we are here for.

LinkedIn settings and limits checked 19 August 2026. About section 2,600 characters, ~300 shown before “See more”: AuthoredUp, LinkedIn Character Limits (updated 11 August 2026). 2026 section checked 30 September 2026: LinkedIn, New verification features (23 September 2026) and LinkedIn Recruiter Lite. Setting names and menu paths: LinkedIn Help — Share profile updates with your network.