Five Questions
What can somebody who has never met you actually tell about your work?
You have spent a career on this. Everyone who has worked with you knows exactly what you are worth. The problem is everyone who has not.
That gap is not a competence problem and it is not a confidence problem. It is a legibility problem. The people who could hire you land on your profile, spend less time there than you would believe, and leave with nothing they can repeat to anyone else.
Five questions about your own profile. Roughly three minutes. Nothing is stored and nothing is sent anywhere.
You are answering these about yourself, so what comes back is a read of your answers, not of your profile. If you want a blind read of the profile itself, by somebody who goes in knowing nothing about you, that is at the end. I write those by hand, one at a time.
Tip: you can answer with the number keys.
If the people who hire you are contracting officers inside federal agencies, or executives inside health systems, they are not finding you by scrolling. They are asking two people. Anyone who tells you a posting habit replaces that is selling you something.
What your profile does is not discovery. It is what happens in the four minutes after somebody says your name and the other person looks you up. Whether they find someone whose work they can describe to a colleague, or a job title.
That is a smaller job than the internet usually claims. It is also the difference between a warm introduction that turns into a conversation and one that quietly does not.
Who I am
Someone told me once she'd been using the same word for her work for years, carried over from an earlier career. To her it meant the whole practice she'd built. To the people she wanted as clients it meant something else entirely.
Hers was easy to see because it was one word. Usually it is spread across a whole profile. You'll tell me what you do and it comes out as background and credentials and what you believe about leadership. All true, all about you. Then later you'll mention a situation you are in the middle of with a client, and that is the one somebody would have stopped for.
Making that switch on your own writing is hard. You spent years earning what you know.
I write LinkedIn content for coaches and consultants. I work remotely, so that means anywhere in the US. I've been in this industry over five years, and this is the problem I keep running into.