Your LinkedIn Profile

Your Headline

Your headline is the next most important thing after your photo. It tells recruiters and hiring managers, in a hot second, who you are.

The advice your university gave you, usually some version of "Student at" your school's name, is fine while you are a junior who is not job hunting. But the moment you are a senior, graduating, looking for an internship or a job, or you just landed your first one, drop the word "student" in any form. If your headline says student in any way, recruiters look right past your profile.

Instead, put the title of the role you want. If you want to do social media marketing, your headline should say Social Media Marketing Manager. Not Marketing Major, not Marketing Student, not Marketing Student at your university. Once you have real experience, you can move to a more general title.

Your headline and your photo together answer one question for a recruiter: do I look closer at this profile? You want that answered in one second flat. That is the metric.

One caveat: if you look at my headline, it breaks this rule. I own a software company, so who I am trying to reach is completely different. Do not model your headline on mine unless you are an entrepreneur with your own company.

Your Banner

Your banner is the wide, narrow strip behind your name. It is prime real estate, and most people waste it.

A university image or logo is fine while you are a student. But the second you start looking for an internship or a job, or you land that first role, your banner needs to speak to who you are and where you are headed.

Skip the default LinkedIn banner. Skip the photo of you and your friends. Skip the university banner. Put something that instantly signals your field. If you are an accounting major aiming for a corporate or Big Four accounting team, your banner should say accounting. If you want to be a social media marketing manager, it should show that you know social media marketing. The same goes for any field: heading into data, put something about data up there. If you tell me what you do, I should be able to see that you are good at it, right there in the banner.

An example of a banner that signals what you are about at a glance. In this case, Erin runs a software company so she promotes the company by giving it visibility in her banner.

Before you finalize

• Size it 1584 × 396 pixels, a 4:1 strip. Build it in Canva or any design app you like.
• Keep your text and key content on the right half. Your profile photo sits over the lower left, so that space needs to stay empty.
• Do a test upload, then resize your browser wider and narrower and check it on your phone. It crops differently on every screen.
• On a full screen it can look a little too right-sided, so always preview before you finalize.

Your About

Make your About interesting. This is your personal story, the place to show who you are, what you stand for, and what you bring to a team. Your character, your identity, your values.

I am not going to repeat the whole method here, because there is already a guide for exactly this. My TMAY method, short for Tell Me About Yourself, walks you through building a story that is interesting, engaging, and true.

It should be about the length it would take to read out loud in 60 to 90 seconds (the longer version of the info on the TMAY page).

Your Experience

Experience is not your resume. It is a list of the accomplishments and outcomes you achieved in each role. Some of it overlaps with your resume, and some of it does not.

The goal is to make a recruiter or hiring manager think, "wow, this person knows how to get results." Lead with the outcome and the impact, not the task.

Same role, completely different impression. The strong version has a number, a clear outcome, and a sense that you made something measurably better.

Make your titles clear and searchable. Recruiters search LinkedIn by job title, so use the title people actually search for, not an internal one. A company I worked with had a "Happiness Coordinator" who ran every employee event. Nobody searches "Happiness Coordinator." On LinkedIn that should read "Employee Events Coordinator," which is clear, accurate, and findable.

Stay honest about level. If you are a junior product manager, you cannot write "Director of Product." Recontextualize the title so it is clear and external-facing, but never inflate the level or depth of the role.

Keep your experience relevant to your corporate career. Your shift at the McDonald's drive-thru window probably adds noise rather than value, and makes a recruiter skim longer for nothing. The exception is when you can speak to real outcomes that matter for the role you want, like genuine customer-service impact for a corporate customer-service position. This advice assumes you have a degree and are heading into a corporate role that usually expects one.

Your Education

List your education: every university you attended, junior college, grad school, and any university programs or certificates. Mine, for example, includes London Business School, where I did a senior leadership certificate program through my employer at the time, alongside my master's and my bachelor's.

On GPA, leave it off. The only time to include it is when it is 3.6 or higher and you are just starting your very first job. If it is below that, or you are already working, even in an internship or a first job, take it off immediately. GPA is a conversation point, not a written item.