Here is a small tragedy I see all the time. Someone flips on the green Open to Work banner, then waits for the right door to open. But the profile behind the banner is not built for anyone who actually walks up to it. It is not built for the recruiter skimming it in a few seconds, and it is not built for the AI agent now doing the first pass of the search. The banner is a raised hand. The profile is supposed to be the handshake.

This matters more than it used to, in both directions. As of early 2025, LinkedIn said around 220 million members had Open to Work turned on, and the platform’s own guidance is that using it roughly doubles your odds of hearing from a recruiter. At the same time, applications on LinkedIn have been arriving at a pace of roughly 11,000 per minute, up more than 45% year over year, so a lot of that first-pass sorting is now done by software before a person ever looks. Your LinkedIn has two audiences now. The good news, and the whole point of this guide, is that they want most of the same things.

Your two audiences, and why the overlap is bigger than you think

For most of LinkedIn’s life, the only reader that mattered was a person: a recruiter, a hiring manager, a founder. That reader is fast. The often-cited eye-tracking study from Ladders found recruiters spend around seven seconds on a first scan, reading job titles first and bailing quickly on anything cluttered. They slow down and actually read once something earns it, but you have a few seconds to earn it.

Now there is a second reader, and it is a machine. LinkedIn has rolled out an AI “Hiring Assistant” that runs sourcing searches for recruiters. Tools like SeekOut and Juicebox let a recruiter type a plain-English description and rank thousands of profiles against it in seconds. Applicant tracking systems parse your resume into fields before a human sees it. These systems are not reading for inspiration. They are reading for structure: your title, your skills, your location, the words you actually used.

It is tempting to think these two readers pull in opposite directions, that you have to choose between sounding human and being machine-readable. You mostly don’t. The things that make a person want to reach out, specific accomplishments, a clear sense of what you do, a profile that is actually filled in, are the same things a machine can index and rank. The center of the Venn diagram is large. That is where you should spend your effort. Let’s map it.

The map: what each reader wants, ranked

Here is how I think about it. Three zones: what only humans really care about, what only the machines really care about, and the overlap that serves both. Within each zone, I’ve force-ranked the moves into must-do and nice-to-do, because not everything is worth the same effort. Tap each region to see its list. If you do nothing else, do the must-dos in the middle.

Notice what is not on any of these lists: a wall of keywords. That is on purpose, and it deserves its own section.

The trap: optimizing for the robots now backfires with the robots

There is a whole genre of advice that says to stuff your profile with every buzzword a machine might scan for. FinTech, VC, engineer, growth, AI, agentic, cross-functional, and on and on. Some people even paste hidden white-on-white keywords or little instructions to the AI into their resume. I have never liked this, because it reads as over-optimized for a bot and hollow to a human. It turns out it is worse than that: it is increasingly losing with the bots too.

Two things are true now. First, when an applicant tracking system parses your resume, it strips the formatting, so that hidden white text becomes plainly visible to the recruiter on the other side. Recruiters have been very public that when they catch it, they cut the candidate, because as one put it, if you had to hide the keywords, it means they weren’t really there. Second, the AI screeners themselves are getting better at spotting generic, keyword-mirrored, low-effort content. In one 2025 survey of HR professionals, a majority said AI-generated resumes with no real personalization tend to get rejected, and most companies said they now actively check for it. The generic version of everything is now free to produce, so it signals nothing.

It is also worth remembering these systems are still crude. Recent research found that large language models asked to rank identical resumes showed measurable biases, including favoring whichever candidate simply appeared first. You do not want to contort your career into the shape of a tool that flawed. Be specific, be legible, and let the humans do the judging.

How to make a non-linear career make sense by sharing your throughline

A lot of the best people I meet have had non-linear careers, and I have too. When I describe my own journey, I talk about the career jungle gym instead of the career ladder, because the interesting paths go sideways and up and occasionally back down before they climb again. Many of the founders we have been most excited to back at Hustle Fund and 10x Early Hires have had similarly winding paths, following their curiosity down rabbit holes and into new industries. That might not have sat right with our parents’ generation, but it is far more common than mainstream media makes it seem. If you want some inspiration, my friend David Nebinski walks through living examples of this on his podcast, The Portfolio Career. A non-linear path is not a problem to hide, but it is a story you have to tell, because a stranger scanning a list of unrelated titles will not connect the dots for you.

The data backs up why this matters. In surveys of hiring managers, frequent job changes are one of the most commonly cited hesitations, and a big share specifically worry about a work history that “lacks direction.” The fix is almost never to hide the moves. It is to give them a throughline. When I look at a candidate, I am trying to find the thread that has actually energized them across roles. Sometimes it is a mission they keep circling back to. Sometimes it is a type of problem, or a kind of team, or a hunger to keep learning the newest thing. That thread is what tells me whether someone is a missionary or a mercenary, and it is the single most useful thing your About section can make clear.

So write the connective tissue. A short, honest narrative that says: here is what I keep being drawn to, here is what each of these moves taught me, and here is why that makes me good for what’s next. Done well, five unrelated jobs stop looking like restlessness and start looking like a person who has been building toward something. And if you moved for a plain reason, a layoff, a relocation, a founder swing that didn’t work, one clear line beats a suspicious gap every time. For what it’s worth, most hiring managers are far more forgiving of career breaks than job seekers fear; only a small minority treat a gap as a dealbreaker.

Give people context: mental models for your companies, school, and title

Almost every profile quietly assumes the reader already knows how impressive the background is. But a stranger’s mental map is small. It reliably covers the Magnificent Seven and the handful of companies that just went public or are about to, the SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic tier and their fast followers, and not much beyond that. So if you worked somewhere real but off that short list, went to a school they cannot place, or hold a title that hides what you actually did, the honest reaction is a small “huh,” and then they scroll on. Your job is to remove every “huh.”

The fix is a mental model. Borrow a reference the reader already understands. “I led growth at Company X, the Ramp of Southeast Asia” or “the Uber of Berlin” does more in eight words than a paragraph of description, and it makes your experience legible and credible on sight. This is not only for international candidates, though it matters enormously if you are applying into the US market from a company that is a household name at home and unknown here. It is for anyone whose resume sits even slightly outside the default map.

Do it in three places. For companies, add a sentence on what the company is, how big it got, and why it was hard, plus the “X of Y” shorthand. For your title and role, spell out the superhuman skills hidden inside it, because “Operations Associate” can mean anything while “built the process that let us triple orders with no new headcount” means something specific. Lead with the outcome you drove, in numbers, not the job description. For school, if a strong GPA helps, add it, and if you chose the school for a specific renowned program or professor, say so, because that is more interesting and credible than the name alone. Where a school ranks is a poor proxy for how good someone is, and plenty of the best people come from places nobody is impressed by. The move is never to fake prestige. It is to give a stranger enough context to understand the caliber and the intent behind your choices. One useful side effect: naming these companies and programs in plain text also hands the search tools more real, specific terms to match you on.

Don’t let your LinkedIn be an artifact of the past

Here is a pattern I notice constantly: profiles that are, in effect, artifacts. They describe where the world was, not where it is going. They list a craft exactly as it was practiced three years ago, with no signal about how that craft is changing or how the person is changing with it. When I look at, say, a videographer whose profile reads like it was written before the current wave of AI tools existed, I genuinely cannot tell how transferable their skills are to this moment. That ambiguity costs them, and it is completely fixable.

There are two kinds of future-facing signal worth adding. The first is the evergreen, human layer: the social and emotional skills that do not go out of date, judgment, taste, how you work with people, how you lead through ambiguity. The second is showing that you have leveled up your actual craft for where things are heading, that you work in an AI-first way now, that you have folded new tools into how you operate rather than being threatened by them. You do not have to reinvent yourself. You have to show you are still learning, because that is the single trait early-stage founders screen for most.

This matters more now that hiring is shifting toward skills-based hiring, where recruiters screen on what you can actually do rather than your pedigree. The catch is that specific technical skills decay fast, some of them within six to twelve months. So list the concrete, current skills and certifications of your craft, but pair them with the meta-skills that do not expire, and show that you keep learning through the courses and continuing education you have actually done. Specific plus current plus proof beats a static list of tools every time.

The best way to show all of this is not a list at all. It is a short story about something you built. Earlier this week I was with a group of people telling the stories of projects they had shipped, and the structure I kept recommending is the one that works on a profile too:

• The problem you noticed. Start with the real thing you observed, not the technology. What was broken or missing?
• How you diagnosed it. Show your thinking. How did you figure out what was actually going on?
• How you found the right solution. The options you weighed, and why you chose the one you chose. This is where judgment shows.
• What you built, end to end, and what it did. You took it all the way to something real that delivered value, and here is the outcome.
• What is next. This is a beginning, not a trophy. Showing that it continues is what makes you look alive rather than done.

A single project told this way does more than a dozen skill tags. It proves you can see a problem, reason about it, and ship, which is the whole job at an early-stage company. And the way to keep that story from going stale is to let your profile keep moving, which is the next section.

How to make your LinkedIn a living profile, with three examples

If the last section was about not looking like the past, this one is about actively reading as present tense. A profile should feel like a living thing, not a tombstone. A few low-effort ways to get there. Link out to something dynamic: a portfolio, a personal site, a GitHub, a Substack, an X profile, anything that shows the current version of your work rather than a frozen summary of it. For technical roles this doubles as machine signal, since sourcing tools actively ingest GitHub and publications. Post occasionally, too. You do not need to become an influencer, but a few genuine posts about what you are learning or building are the difference between a profile that looks abandoned and one that belongs to someone in motion, and it quietly helps you show up as active.

One underrated move: show the things you do beyond the minimum of your job. A hackathon you entered, a side project, a community you help run, a course you took for fun. These signal that you are motivated past the exact requirements of any role, which is exactly what early-stage teams are hunting for.

The fastest way to internalize all of this is to look at people who already do it well. A few worth studying:

The underlying idea is the one running through this whole guide. Static reads as past tense. A little living, current signal reads as present and future tense, and that is who gets contacted.

How hiring is changing, and how often to revisit your profile

The backdrop to all of this is a hiring market under real strain. Applications have exploded, in part because candidate-side AI can now fire off tailored-looking applications at scale, and recruiting teams have gotten leaner. The average job now draws a couple hundred applications, and both sides increasingly distrust the process. The predictable response from companies is more AI: more automated first-pass sourcing, more screening, and more weight on finding good people through proactive search and trusted referrals rather than the giant inbound pile. Two things follow from that, and they are not the same thing:

1. Being easy to find matters more than ever. The outbound search is now a primary channel, and it only surfaces people it can parse. That is the structured, specific, complete, standard-term profile from the middle of the Venn. If a sourcing tool cannot read you, you are not in the running, no matter how good you are.
2. Being found is not the same as being chosen. Once you are surfaced, a human decides, so give them a reason. Be visible by posting and commenting on relevant conversations, not just by having the right nouns in your profile. And be human. Show personality and real proof of work. If you invented and won the office chocolate chip cookie contest, say so. If you moved across the country or the world for a job, a school, or an opportunity, say that too. Those details are what a person remembers and a keyword match never captures.

The through-line is the same one this whole guide is built on. Point one is how you win with the machines. Point two is how you win with the humans. You need both, and they do not conflict.

On cadence, there is no magic number, but there is a habit worth building. While you are on the hunt, study the profiles of people who already hold the jobs you want. This is something AI can genuinely help with: not to copy anyone, but to reverse-engineer what is working on strong profiles and give yourself a framework to adapt. Then stay willing to update as you learn, because the norms shift quickly. At a minimum, refresh the moment anything real changes, a new role, a new skill, a shipped project, and reread your headline, About, and Skills every quarter with one question in mind: does this describe where I am headed, or only where I have been? If it is the latter, you have found your next twenty minutes of work.

The 20-minute LinkedIn cleanup checklist

If you only have one sitting, work through these, roughly in order of payoff.

• Rewrite your headline to name what you actually do and your focus, in plain, searchable words.
• Rewrite your About into a short throughline that connects your moves and points forward, with one line of context for any pivot or gap.
• Turn your top three roles into outcome bullets. For each, show what you built and the result you drove, with numbers, instead of describing the job. Show it, do not just tell it.
• Add context to any company or school a stranger may not recognize, using the “X of Y” mental model from the section above.
• Fix your Skills section. Fill it with the real, standard terms of your craft, add relevant certifications and recent courses, and lean on meta-skills alongside the technical ones that date quickly. Where you can, point to proof.
• Add at least one link to your work: a portfolio, personal site, GitHub, Substack, X, even a SoundCloud. Whatever shows the living version of what you do.
• Upload a professional photo that is clear and well lit.

That is a profile built for both of your readers.

When you are ready to actually use it, remember that the best early-stage roles rarely come through the apply button. Join our talent collective to get in front of founders directly, and read how to get a job at an early-stage startup and how to find the roles that never get posted for the rest of the playbook.