Get Found on LinkedIn

So, you completed your profile on LinkedIn following UA Grantham’s advice in How to Create a Professional LinkedIn Profile, and you even included a professional-looking headshot following our how-to guide. Great! This means that people who view your profile will get an excellent overview of your abilities, accomplishments, and professional progressions.

But… for your profile to be seen it has to be found first.  Put another way, if you want recruiters to find you on LinkedIn, your profile can’t just look good: It has to be searchable. Fortunately, there is a way to manage this: Meet one of the most overlooked and underused parts of your profile – the Skills section.

Most professionals treat skills like a checklist; people who know how to use LinkedIn treat them like keywords. In fact, the Skills section matters quite a lot. Headhunters and recruiters don’t scroll endlessly hoping to stumble across your profile. They search using specific keywords tied to roles, tools, and capabilities.

And so, at the core of the tools LinkedIn provides recruiters are algorithms that rely heavily on your listed skills to determine whether you appear in recruiter searches, how relevant your profile is for a given role, and which opportunities you get identified for.

If your skills don’t align with what recruiters are searching for, you become effectively invisible, no matter how strong your experience is. Think of your Skills section as your way to tell LinkedIn exactly what you want to be found for.

Why you should use all 100 skills slots

LinkedIn allows you to list up to 100 skills. Most people list 10 to 20. That’s a missed opportunity. Here’s why using all 100 skills matters: first, more keywords (i.e. skills) mean more search visibility. Every skill you list is another entry point for discovery. The more relevant terms you include, the more searches you can appear in.

Another reason to use all 100 slots is to increase your chances of being found. Different recruiters search differently. For example, for the same advertising role, one headhunter might search for the skill “Google Ads” while another might search for “PPC Advertising” - same role, different searches.  So, using all 100 slots lets you cover the full language of your field.

Moreover, listing 100 skills is a way for you to signal depth and breadth. A full and complete skill list will therefore show your core competencies, tools and platforms, capabilities, and specialized knowledge. If you are a mid-career professional or only have a few roles under your belt, by matching skills to roles on your LinkedIn profile you can connect everything.

What Kinds of Skills Should You Include?

To fully optimize your profile, your skills list should include a mix of technology skills and tools; functional skills; strategic skills that are key to success in your specialty; technical skills; and industry-specific skills. The goal is to reflect not just what you do, but how your work connects to outcomes.

How to identify the skills you want to include in this section?

Thankfully, AI applications like ChatGPT and others can help you identify your high-impact skills list. Instead of guessing which skills to include, you can use AI to reverse-engineer your market.  Here are the steps you should take:

Step 1: Describe Your Role

Start with a prompt like this to get a string baseline: “I work in [your role] and focus on [your responsibilities]. Generate a list of 50 to 100 hard skills used in this field.”

Step 2: Expand and Refine

Go deeper. Ask for skills by seniority level, ask for skills used by top performers, ask for adjacent or emerging skills. For example, ask your favorite AI tool: “What skills do senior-level professionals in this role have that mid-level professionals often don’t?”

Step 3: Align to Search Behavior

Next, optimize for discoverability, so that you capture real-world search language, not just textbook terms. For example, use this prompt: “Generate variations and synonyms for these skills that recruiters might search for.”

Step 4: Prioritize and Organize

Finally, now that you have a long list of skills, do the following:  First, identify your top 10 to 15 core skills. These should be at the top of the list. Fill the remaining slots with supporting and related skills and make sure everything aligns with the roles you want next, not just the ones you’ve had.

Common mistakes to avoid include listing too few skills, which reduces your visibility; using vague or generic terms only (“Sales” isn’t enough, be more specific); ignoring tools and platforms - because recruiters often search for exact technologies; failing to update skills as your role evolves - remember, your profile should reflect where you’re going, not just where you’ve been.

In closing, the key point is that on LinkedIn, getting found isn’t accidental - it is the result of implementing a proper strategy when it comes to your skills. The Skills section is one of the few places where you have direct control over how you are indexed and discovered. Treat it like a strategic asset, not an afterthought.

So, fill all 100 slots. Be intentional with your keywords. Use tools like ChatGPT to ensure you align with how recruiters search. Remember: If you are not showing up, you are not being considered. In today’s economy, that is a risk you do not need to take.