How do recruiters actually find you on LinkedIn?

Recruiters do not browse LinkedIn looking for interesting people. We run a filtered search, and the results of that search are the only candidates who exist for that role. If your profile does not contain the words the search was built from, you were not rejected. You were simply not there.

That distinction matters more than anything else you will ever write on your profile.

So what does a real search look like?

A search starts with a role, never with a candidate. The role comes in, it goes out on the job boards and on LinkedIn, and that covers the people who are actively looking. Everybody else, the passive market, has to be found.

That is where LinkedIn Recruiter comes in. I usually start deliberately vague, something like DevOps Engineer, just to see the size of the pool. If the volume is unmanageable, and it normally is, I narrow: more keywords, filters on location, industry, seniority, tenure in the current position, education, willingness to relocate.

In my experience most searches end with somewhere between 10 and 40 messages sent. Sometimes you cast the net wide because the brief is difficult. I still believe that number should be lower than it is.

Why do qualified people never appear at all?

The most common reason a strong candidate is never contacted is that a skill they have is not written anywhere on their profile. Specialists are the worst offenders. They list the impressive things and skip the obvious ones: the everyday stacks, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, the tools so routine that mentioning them feels slightly beneath them.

Filters do not know what is beneath you. A filter only knows what is written.

It gets more expensive with the uncommon things. GxP experience in pharma. A security clearance for sensitive data roles. These are the qualifications that open the better paid and harder to fill vacancies, and I have seen people leave them off because they assumed it was implied.

Think of ordering food on a delivery app with the vegetarian filter switched on. The kitchen down the road makes the best vegetarian dish in the city. They never ticked the box. You will never see it, and they will never know you were looking.

Is Open to Work enough?

Open to Work is a filter, not a strategy. It tells me you are available. It does not tell me what you can do, and availability was never the hard part of my job.

And when a search is built badly, you feel it directly. Those irrelevant messages landing in your inbox are not evidence that recruiters are spamming for sport. They are evidence of a search that was too vague, sent by somebody with too many roles open.

Let's face it, most of us have written our profile for a human reader. The first reader is a filter.

What makes me skip a profile that did appear?

Appearing in the results is not the same as being opened. When I am moving quickly, the profiles I pass over tend to share the same gaps, and none of those gaps are about ability.

No photo. Ten years of self-employment with no projects listed underneath, so I cannot tell whether the work was complex or routine. An employer with no page and no logo, which quietly raises a question about the scale of the environment. Six different job titles across six roles, when the brief rewards somebody who looks consistent.

None of these are fair judgements. They are fast ones, and the volume is what forces the speed. You cannot control the logo. You can control the line underneath it.

Does the system actually work?

Here is the part where I have to admit the system has a hole in it, and I am sitting inside the hole.

An agency desk commonly carries somewhere between 30 and 60 open roles at a time, and nobody fills all of them. Some get filled by a competitor. When that happens I go and look at who they placed, and often the candidate existed the whole time. My search simply never reached him.

So does it work? It does, in the narrow sense. The people I found got interviews. But the best person got the job, and the best person was not always in my results. Every candidate I put forward was next in line behind somebody I never saw.

I still get this wrong. Not once, and not rarely. Close to every week.

You are not really competing with the other applicants for a role. You are competing with the version of you that fits inside a search box, and that version is much smaller than the real one. Write the profile for the filter first. The human reads it second, and only if the filter let them through.