Someone messaged me this week and asked how to stand out better on LinkedIn while they are actively job searching, and I started typing a response and then realized I had about four paragraphs worth of thoughts and I hadn’t even gotten to the good part yet. So I closed the DM and decided to make it a whole thing. You’re welcome, and I’m sorry to that person, but here you go!!!!!

My guilty pleasure is 90s/2000s movies (and Bravo TV, of course!), and I have a very strong and well-documented opinion that the makeover scene is always, without exception, the best scene in every single one of them. She's All That, The Princess Diaries, Miss Congeniality, Clueless, all of them. The transformation, the reveal, the music!!!! I will never not be obsessed with it. So we are bringing that energy to The Offer Letter today.

This is the first installment of what I am calling the Job Search Makeover Series, where we are going to go piece by piece through everything that is either helping or hurting your chances of bagging The Offer Letter™️. We are starting today with your LinkedIn bio, also known as your About section, also known as the part of your profile that most people either completely ignore (don’t look at my profile, I’m an ignorer) or fill with words that mean absolutely nothing.

I have been placing candidates for a long time and I look at a lot of LinkedIn profiles. A lot a lot. And I can tell you with full confidence that most people's bios are giving nothing! So let's get into it.

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•Executive Assistant to CEO – Nashville/ Remote [Apply here]

•EA to CFO and CEO – Apollo (big Apollo fan) [Apply here]

•EA to VP, CSM – Remote [Apply here]

Good luck if you applied!!!!

Here is the thing that most people genuinely do not know: your LinkedIn About section is actively indexed by LinkedIn's algorithm every time a recruiter runs a search. When I open LinkedIn Recruiter and type in terms like "executive assistant C-suite calendar management" or "operations coordinator Notion project management," LinkedIn scans profiles and surfaces the ones that contain those words. If your bio does not have those terms in it, you are simply not appearing in those results, no matter how qualified you actually are for the role.

And here is the part I find genuinely interesting: even updating one or two words in your bio can move you higher in search results. LinkedIn's algorithm gives extra weight to recently updated sections, so a profile that has not been touched since 2022 is going to rank lower than one that was updated last week, even if the content is otherwise similar. You do not need to overhaul your entire profile every month. You just need to make small, intentional updates regularly to stay visible to the people who are looking for someone like you.

This is the step most people skip entirely, and it is the most important one. Do not guess at your keywords and do not Google a generic list. Here is what actually works.

Pull up five to ten job descriptions for the exact roles you are targeting right now. Read through them and start noting the words and phrases that keep coming up repeatedly. Not the filler language like "collaborative self-starter" or "fast-paced environment." I mean the actual functional terms: the job titles, the tools, the types of responsibilities, the systems. Those repeating phrases are what recruiters are typing into their searches, and they need to live somewhere in your profile.

You can absolutely use AI to help with this. Paste those job descriptions plus your current resume into Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to identify the keywords that appear most frequently across the job descriptions and are also supported by your actual experience. Then ask it to draft you a LinkedIn bio that incorporates those keywords naturally. It genuinely works well as a starting point. Just please read it before you post it, because AI has a very recognizable writing voice when left unedited, and your bio should sound like a person wrote it, specifically the person that you are.

You have 2,600 characters to work with in your About section. Here is a simple structure that uses that space well and hits the algorithm in the right places.

⓵ Open with who you are and what you do, in plain language. One or two sentences, first person. Do not start with "I am a results-driven..." Start with something that actually tells me what you do and for whom. "I'm an executive assistant with eight years of experience supporting C-suite leaders at high-growth tech companies" is miles better than "Dedicated professional with a passion for excellence."

⓶ Get specific about your skills and experience using the keywords from your target job descriptions. What systems and tools do you know? What types of organizations or executives have you supported? What are the two or three things you are genuinely excellent at? Write this in a way that sounds natural, but be intentional about the exact language you are using because those words are doing double duty for you.

⓷ Include a line about what you are looking for. This helps with LinkedIn's job matching features, which also pull from your About section as a relevance signal. Something like "Currently seeking EA or Chief of Staff opportunities with Series B and beyond technology companies" is specific enough to actually work in your favor.

⓸ End with an open door. "Feel free to reach out" or "Open to connecting with recruiters and operators in the tech space." It sounds minor but it signals approachability, and approachable profiles get more recruiter messages.

The second one is not fancier or more impressive on paper. It just uses the right words in the right places, which is what gets you found in the first place so that someone can actually read it.

Endorsements on your listed skills affect how you rank when recruiters search for those skills specifically. Endorsed skills carry more weight than unendorsed ones in search results. It is worth reaching out to a few connections and asking them to endorse the skills most relevant to your current job search. It takes them thirty seconds and it genuinely moves the needle.

If you have the Open to Work (PLEASE DON’T USE THE GREEN BANNER! Just use the setting that ONLY shows recruiters) feature turned on, go into those settings and make sure you have added every reasonable variation of your target job title, not just one. LinkedIn uses those titles for its matching features, and most people only fill in a single option and leave it there.

And if you have not updated your profile recently, go change literally one sentence somewhere today. That is all it takes to refresh the recency signal and nudge yourself back up in search results.

More makeover installments are coming!!! If there is a specific part of your job search you want me to tackle next, reply and let me know. ❤

If you want a recruiter's eye on your actual resume, I am taking a limited number of resume rewrites until the end of this month (11:59 CDT on the 31st!) at $150 (normally $250). Grab a slot below, and use code GOODBYEMAY:

Was any of this helpful?! Hit reply and let me know :)