What a complete LinkedIn profile actually looks like in 2026

The checklist

• A clear headshot, cropped shoulders-up, neutral background. No filters, no group crops.
• A headline that is not your job title. Your title is already in your current role. Use the headline to say what you do and for whom.
• A short About — 3-5 lines, plain prose, written to a human. No emojis, no bullet-point dumps.
• Every role has one sentence and 2-3 outcomes. Not a paragraph. Not 20 bullets. One sentence of context, 2-3 outcomes of impact.
• Featured section with 2-4 items — the artefact version of your work. Deck, write-up, product launch, open-source repo.
• Skills that match your work, endorsed sparingly. Nobody believes "48 endorsements for JavaScript".

Five things that hurt

1. Keyword-stuffed headline ("PMP | MBA | Agile | Scrum | Six Sigma | Leadership").
2. A CV-paste in the About section.
3. Selfies or a group photo cropped to one face.
4. "Opportunities" listed before actual experience.
5. Engagement in the form of "great post!" comments on every post in your feed.

If you want a second opinion, the LinkedIn optimizer runs a pattern match against this list and tells you exactly what to change.