The Wall Street Journal ran a piece recently on LinkedIn makeovers that actually get people hired. It’s directionally correct. Four real people, real outcomes, real tactics that worked. But read it carefully and you start to notice something: each story describes one person touching a different part of the same elephant. The posting strategy. The skills section. The profile metrics. The About section. Each one true. Each one incomplete.
I’ve been a recruiter for decades and have reviewed tens of thousands of LinkedIn profiles. Here’s what’s actually going on beneath the surface.
Posting Frequently: It’s Network Activation, Not Content Strategy
One of the job seekers committed to posting on LinkedIn every weekday during his unemployment. He shared interview answers, reposted industry content, added his own commentary. It eventually paid off: a former colleague saw one of his posts, connected him to an opening at her new company before it was publicly listed, and he landed the job.
The article credits the posting cadence. But look at what actually happened. The person who surfaced the opportunity already knew him. The post didn’t create a relationship. It activated one that already existed, at exactly the right moment. That’s network activation, not content strategy.
LinkedIn’s feed is a broadcast channel. You’re publishing into an algorithm and hoping the right person sees the right post on the right day. The more direct path is the one LinkedIn was actually built for: targeted outreach to people in your existing network and strategic cold outreach to people you want in it. Reach out directly. Reference something specific. Make it easy to say yes. If you want to understand what recruiters are actually looking for when they land on your profile, start there, not with your posting calendar.
Adding Skills: The Question Was Never Whether. It’s Which.
Another job seeker added 56 skills to his profile, using AI to pull relevant terms directly from job postings for the roles he was targeting. Smart move. And the article frames it as a fresh insight.
Here’s the recruiter reality: skills have been a core filter on LinkedIn since the early days of the platform. Recruiters have been searching by skill keywords for years. This is not a new discovery.
What the article doesn’t surface is the more important question: which skills, and how do they cluster? A long list that spans too many functions or industries sends a diluted signal. Recruiters aren’t just checking whether a skill appears. They’re reading the overall pattern to answer a faster question: does this person solve the problem I’m trying to fill?
Skills selection is a positioning decision, not a data entry task. The goal isn’t to match every keyword in every job posting. It’s to make the right signal unmistakable to the right reader.
Profile Views: A Vanity Metric You’re Probably Misreading
One of the article’s subjects tracked his LinkedIn profile views after each change, watching whether the number went up or down. A reasonable experiment. But views are the wrong variable.
From the recruiting side of the screen, view counts are noise. What matters is the composition of those views. Who is looking?
Ten views from people outside your target function, industry, or seniority level is a false signal. One view from a hiring manager at the right company, or from an executive search consultant running an active search, is the whole game. LinkedIn will show you exactly who those viewers are, and you don’t need a Premium subscription to see them. If you know how to use the platform properly, that information is already available to you.
The metric that signals traction isn’t volume. It’s relevance. As we’ve written before, a LinkedIn profile is a strategic asset, and that means every element, including who is finding you, needs to be evaluated strategically, not just counted.
AI-Generated About Sections: Competent Is Not the Same as Distinctive
One job seeker used multiple AI tools to revise and re-revise his About section, iterating until it felt right, then ran drafts by former colleagues for human feedback. The result was a polished, plain-English account of his impact at Microsoft that helped him land at Boeing.
Using AI as a drafting tool is reasonable. But there’s a risk the article doesn’t name.
AI generates prose based on prevailing conventional wisdom. It’s trained on what LinkedIn Abouts already look like, which means it tends to produce language that sounds like everyone else’s polished, conventional About section. Confident. Accomplished. Forgettable. When everyone uses the same tools with the same prompts against the same templates, the output converges. Standing out requires a point of view the AI doesn’t have access to, which is yours.
A quick analogy from recruiting: resumes are supposed to be a maximum of two pages. Worth aiming for. But in decades of reviewing candidates, I have never once seen a client pass on someone exceptional because the resume ran three pages. Rules of thumb are not laws. The same applies to About sections. The goal isn’t to follow the template. It’s to be unmistakably you, which is both an art and a science.
The Elephant in the Room
Each of the four people in the WSJ piece touched something real. Posting matters. Skills matter. Profile quality matters. The About section matters. The outcomes were genuine.
But these are components, not a system. Optimizing components without a foundation produces a profile that looks polished but doesn’t convert.
The foundation is positioning. Who are you, for whom, solving what problem? That answer determines which skills to feature, what your About section should say, who you should be reaching out to, and what signal your profile sends before a recruiter reads a single word. Without it, you can do everything the article recommends and still produce something that attracts the wrong people, or no one at all.
A well-positioned LinkedIn profile isn’t built from the outside in. It starts with clarity about who you are and who needs to find you. Everything else follows from that.
