An employer searching for candidates works through a long list of people they know nothing about. They have limited time, no way to verify most of what they read, and other profiles waiting below yours. In that situation small details carry far more weight than they should.
Four of them come up again and again. None is about experience or qualifications. Each takes about two minutes to fix.
1. Half a name
A surprising number of profiles carry only a first name.
This creates a practical problem before it creates any impression. An employer cannot find you again later, cannot pass your profile to a colleague and refer to somebody specific, and cannot check that the person on the profile matches the CV attached to it. A profile whose very first field is incomplete also invites the assumption that the rest will be too.
There is a quieter doubt attached as well. Someone genuinely looking for work usually wants to be identified.
The fix: put your full name in the name field, first and last, spelled the way it appears on your official documents and your CV. If the two do not match, the employer has to reconcile them, and some will not bother.
2. A job history with no employers
The second problem is roles listed with a job title and nothing else. "Sales Representative" with no company name. "Accountant" with the employer field left empty.
That cannot be evaluated. A sales role at a two-person shop and a sales role at a regional distributor are different jobs sharing a title, and the company name is what tells a reader which one you did. It is also the fastest credibility check available: a named employer can be verified, an unnamed one cannot.
Some candidates leave it blank deliberately, usually because they are still employed and do not want their current employer to see. That is a reasonable worry with a better solution than a blank field.
The fix: name the employer for every role. If you genuinely cannot name your current one, describe it instead of leaving it empty. "Regional logistics company, 200 staff" tells an employer far more than silence does. And if the concern is your current employer finding your profile, use the privacy setting on your profile rather than hollowing out your history.
3. No dates on anything
Roles listed without a start or end date frustrate a reader more than any other item on this list.
Dates are how a career becomes legible. Without them nobody can tell whether you spent six years somewhere or six weeks, whether you are currently employed, whether your most recent role ended last month or in 2019, or what order any of it happened in. It is a story with the pages shuffled.
There is an unfortunate assumption attached, too. Undated histories are common enough that recruiters have formed a theory about them, which is that the candidate is hiding a short tenure or a long gap. Usually that is not true, and the blank field creates the suspicion anyway.
The fix: add a month and a year to the start and end of every role. The profile has separate fields for both, and a marker for your current position, so use it rather than leaving the end date empty and hoping it is understood. If there is a gap between two roles, one honest line in the description closes the question that a hole leaves open.
4. Cartoon avatars
Cartoon characters, anime figures, football club badges, cars, and occasionally a plain coloured square. All of these appear as profile photos more often than you would expect.
The objection is not aesthetic. A profile photo is the one moment where a candidate stops being a row in a list and becomes a person, and a cartoon has the opposite effect. It makes the profile read as a casual account rather than a professional one, and some employers skip such profiles without reading further, on the assumption that whoever set it up was not serious about being hired.
That may be an unfair reaction to a small choice. It is also a real one, made by the person deciding who to call.
The fix: a plain photo of your face, taken on a phone in daylight, against a wall. That is genuinely enough. Look at the camera, dress as you would for an interview in your field, keep the background uncluttered, and crop it so your head and shoulders fill the frame. No sunglasses, no group photos where nobody can tell which person is you, no heavy filters.
If you would rather not publish a photo at all, that is a legitimate choice, and no picture is better than a cartoon.
Four more things worth ten minutes
Beyond those four, a handful of smaller points separate a strong profile from an average one.
- Write a real professional title. The line under your name is the first thing visible in search results. "Warehouse Supervisor, 6 years in logistics" works. "Looking for opportunities" does not, because it describes your situation rather than your skill.
- Use the summary. Three or four lines saying what you do, your strongest area, and what you are looking for next. An empty summary makes a profile feel abandoned.
- Describe what you actually did. Each role has a description field. Two lines of real duties and one result beats a job title standing alone.
- Check your contact details. A profile with an old phone number is worse than one with none, because the employer tries, fails, and moves on to the next candidate.
Why small things carry so much weight
It is tempting to dismiss all of this as employers being fussy about presentation while ignoring ability. That is not quite what happens.
When someone is assessing strangers at speed, completeness becomes a proxy for seriousness. A profile with a full name, named employers, real dates and a genuine photo signals a person who intends to be hired. A profile missing all four signals someone who created an account and stopped.
The unfair part is that the second profile often belongs to a perfectly good candidate who simply did not finish the form. That is the whole point of this article, because the gap between those two profiles is about ten minutes of work.
A ten-minute checklist
Open your profile now and check the following:
- Full name, first and last, matching your CV.
- A real photo of your face, or no photo at all.
- A professional title describing what you do.
- A summary of three or four lines.
- Every role: job title, employer name, location, start month and year, end month and year or the current-role marker.
- A short description under each role.
- Education with institution and year.
- Skills and languages added, with honest levels.
- A phone number and email you actually check.
- Your CV uploaded and up to date.
Every item on that list is a field that already exists on your profile, waiting to be filled. Nothing here is difficult. It comes down to telling an employer who you are, where you worked, and when.
