Your profile is a door. Can anyone read the sign on it?
Five surfaces decide whether the right person finds you and whether what they find makes any case at all. Ten honest questions score each one, name the surface costing you the most, and give you the specific rewrite with a worked example. Nothing is fetched and nothing is looked up.
Somebody checks you out for about ninety seconds
A recruiter before a call. A prospective client after a referral. Somebody running diligence on a board seat. None of them read your profile. They scan the top of it, form a view, and either keep going or close the tab, and you never find out which.
The recruiter searching, not browsing
They arrive through a search on the words your industry uses for the thing you do. If those words are absent from your headline, the search never reaches you, and no amount of quality further down the page compensates for not appearing.
The referral checking you are real
Somebody recommended you and this person is confirming the recommendation. They want evidence of judgment rather than evidence of employment. An empty featured section and a list of responsibilities gives them nothing to confirm.
The peer deciding whether to engage
They read the first two lines of your About and stop. Everything after sits behind an expand link that most people never click, which makes those two lines the most valuable and most wasted real estate on the page.
Scored in proportion to how often they are read
The headline carries three of the ten questions because it appears in every search result, above every comment you leave, and at the top of every message you send. Skills carries one, because almost nobody reads it and search does. Weighting by attention rather than by effort is the whole point.
The title-plate mistake is the standard senior failure: writing the headline as a nameplate on an office door, announcing what you are called and where you work. Both facts are visible elsewhere on the page. The headline is the only line that travels with you across the platform, and it should carry the problem you handle rather than the position you hold.
Two lines show before the expand link and most readers never click it. Yours probably spends them on a career summary, which repeats information sitting three inches lower on the same page. The third-person About is the other common senior habit, and it reads as a press release written by somebody who has never met you.
Most role descriptions record custody: what you were responsible for. At your level responsibility is table stakes and it separates you from nobody, since everyone who held your title had the same remit. What distinguishes you is what changed while you held it, with the number attached wherever you have one.
The exhibit test: would you point a stranger at this? An empty featured section wastes the one place on the page where you can show work rather than describe it. A stale one is worse, since it dates you precisely, telling a reader exactly how long it has been since you had something worth showing.
The search-term prune. Almost nobody reads this section and search reads all of it, which means every skill you have not deleted is a claim you are still making. Most senior lists are archives: things you did a decade ago, things you no longer want work in, and two or three that were never skills at all.
Nothing is fetched, scraped, or stored
Plenty of profile scoring tools work by pulling your page and grading what they find. We decided against that twice over. Scraping a platform to score its users carries a legal exposure we were not willing to take on, and the results are worse anyway, because the interesting questions are not machine-readable.
A scraper can count the words in your headline. It cannot tell you whether those are the words a recruiter would search, whether you would actually point a stranger at what you featured, or whether the last three roles describe what changed because you were there. Those need your honest answer, which is also why an optimistic one produces a useless score and helps nobody.
The ten answers are scored in your browser. They are not transmitted, and they are gone when you close the tab.
Ten questions. Open your profile in another tab and answer against what is actually there.
Answering from memory produces a flattering score, because everyone remembers the version they intended to write.
Your headline right now says:
The first pass takes an hour. The problem is that it is not a one-time job.
A profile is a surface rather than a document. It goes stale silently: no notification, no reminder, no moment where anything visibly breaks. Every role change, every quarter, every shift in what you want to be found for means running the pass again, and almost nobody does, which is why almost nobody is findable.
What keeping a profile current costs
Agent Craft's own time estimate, not a published statistic. Three hours a year is trivial, which is the honest and slightly annoying point: the profile is the cheapest thing on this list and the reason people stay invisible is not the profile. It is the third line. A perfect door with an empty room behind it holds a reader for a few seconds, and there is no checklist that fills the room.
The door is an hour. The record behind it is the build.
Agent Craft's strategy layer includes the profile logic, so the headline, the About opening and the search terms come out of the positioning rather than out of guesswork. Then it builds the half no checklist can reach: the body of work behind the door, growing every week from a two-minute voice note.
- Your positioning set once, then applied to the profile surfaces and to everything you publish afterwards
- A voice note a week becomes finished content in your language across LinkedIn, X, TikTok, and YouTube, which is where the featured section stops being a problem
- Strategy guided by a marketing lead with twenty years running global brands, so the record accumulates in one direction instead of five
- A personal brand CRM collects the people who arrive through the door, qualifies them, and nurtures them by email
The five surfaces on one printable page
Each surface with its pass or fail test and the rewrite move in a single line, sized to sit beside you while you edit, plus the quarterly re-run reminder that this page just argued you will otherwise forget. Get the Executive Profile Checklist.
Reasonable questions
Why not just look at my profile and tell me?
Two reasons, and the second is the better one. Scraping a platform to grade its users carries legal exposure we declined to take on. More usefully, the questions worth asking cannot be answered by looking. Whether you would point a stranger at what you featured, and whether your headline uses the words a recruiter would actually search, are judgments only you can make about your own field.
Why is the headline worth three times the skills section?
Because it is read roughly three hundred times more often. Your headline travels with you: search results, comment threads, message previews, connection requests. Your skills section is read by a search index and almost nobody else. The weighting follows attention rather than effort, which is why the cheapest fix on the page is also the highest return.
I scored high. Is there anything to do?
Diarize the quarterly re-run and then stop thinking about your profile, because it is no longer your constraint. A polished door with nothing behind it holds a reader for a few seconds, and the thing that keeps them is a visible record of how you think. That is a different build and it takes longer than an hour.
Does this apply to platforms other than LinkedIn?
The five surfaces are written against LinkedIn because that is where recruiters, peers and referrals actually check. Four of the five transfer directly to any professional profile: a headline, an opening, a record of what changed, and current exhibits. The search-term prune is more LinkedIn-specific.
Who is this not for?
Anyone early in a career, since the questions assume senior surfaces and senior mistakes. Anyone wanting a machine verdict without self-honesty, because the answers are the input and there is no way around that. And anyone hoping the profile is the whole problem, since the last section of this page argues fairly directly that it is not.