This article sticks to mechanics LinkedIn documents in its own help centre, and says clearly when something is not documented. There is no published ranking formula, so anyone who offers you one is guessing.
In short
- Your headline appears in search results and can be separate from your job title — use it for the role you want.
- Skills are search infrastructure: up to 100, and LinkedIn says a relevant list improves your likelihood of being found.
- The Featured section exists for work samples as evidence, and is hidden entirely if you leave it empty.
- Open to Work has three visibility levels, with a documented privacy caveat on the recruiters-only option.
- Use the Remote filter in job search plus alerts, and check that your profile location and time zone don't contradict your application.
First, decide what the profile is for
A remote job search has two entry points. Either a recruiter finds you, or you apply and someone checks you out. Those are different jobs, and one profile has to do both.
Being found is a keyword problem. Being chosen is an evidence problem. If you only optimise for the first, you get views that go nowhere. If you only do the second, nobody ever gets there. The audit below alternates deliberately between the two.
The MitHub 7-point profile audit
Work through these in order. Each is tied to a mechanic LinkedIn documents.
1. Headline: the role you want, not the job you have
LinkedIn's help page on editing your headline makes two useful points: the headline is displayed in search results, and it can be separate from the title of your current position. That second point is the one people miss. Your headline is not a label for your employer — it is the one line that follows you into every search result, comment and connection request.
A format that works for remote and AI-adjacent roles:
[Role you want] · [systems you actually work in] · [outcome you produce]
For example: GTM Engineer · Clay, n8n, HubSpot · turning messy lead data into booked meetings. Or, if you're still building toward the role: Operations analyst moving into AI automation · n8n + Zapier · documenting and automating manual processes.
Two rules. Don't claim a title you can't defend in an interview. And use the words that appear in the job posts you want — if every posting says "RevOps" and your headline says "commercial systems specialist", you are invisible to the search that matters. If you don't yet know which title to aim for, what does a GTM engineer do and remote AI jobs for LATAM are good starting points.
2. Skills: treat them as search terms with consequences
LinkedIn's guidance on adding skills states you can add up to 100, and its profile overview says a relevant list of skills helps others understand your strengths and improves your likelihood of being found in others' searches.
The trap is that skills are also a promise. Everything on that list is fair game in an interview. Our rule: list nothing you couldn't demonstrate in twenty minutes on a screen share. Then order them by what you want to be hired for, not by what you know best.
A practical method: open five job posts you would genuinely take, copy every tool and skill term they mention, count the repeats, and make sure the terms appearing in three or more of the five are on your profile — in the skills section and in the experience bullet where you actually used them.
3. Featured: the section that does the persuading
This is the highest-leverage and most-neglected part of a profile. LinkedIn's Featured section FAQs describe it as a place to showcase the best samples of your work as evidence of your skills and experience. You can add posts, articles published on LinkedIn, external links, images and documents. You can add an unlimited number of items, though only 400 are displayed. And critically: if you have nothing to feature, the section is hidden from people viewing your profile.
The same page draws a distinction worth internalising. Featured is curated by you; the Activity section below it shows all your activity from the past 45 days — posts, comments and likes included. One is a portfolio, the other is a log.
What to feature when you are targeting remote roles — three items is enough:
- One build. A workflow, dashboard, enrichment table or automation, with a link or a document explaining the problem and the result.
- One walkthrough. A short screen recording in English explaining that build. It doubles as proof of communication, which is exactly what a remote employer is worried about.
- One written case study. Situation, approach, result, evidence — one page. See how to write a case study for your portfolio.
If you don't have client work yet, build something real for a small business or a clearly labelled practice scenario. Never present practice work as paid work. How to build a portfolio without experience walks through the options.
4. About: answer the recruiter's three questions
Nobody reads an About section for your philosophy. They read it to answer: what do you do, what have you done, and can you work with us? Structure it accordingly — one line on what you do and for whom, three to five lines of concrete evidence with numbers where you have them, one line on your working setup (time zone, overlap hours, contractor or employee), and one line on what you're looking for.
Write it in the language you will work in. If the job is in English, the profile is in English. LinkedIn supports secondary language profiles if you also want a Spanish version.
5. Open to Work: pick the visibility deliberately
LinkedIn's Open to Work documentation explains that specifying the job types and preferred location you're interested in helps your profile show up when recruiters search for candidates. There are three visibility settings:
| Setting | Who sees it | Notes from LinkedIn |
|---|---|---|
| All LinkedIn members | Everyone, including your current colleagues | Adds the #OpenToWork photo frame |
| Recruiters only | People using LinkedIn Recruiter | LinkedIn says it takes steps to prevent Recruiter users at your current company from seeing it, but cannot guarantee complete privacy |
| Visible only to you | Nobody | Preferences are still used to tailor your job recommendations |
If you are employed, read that middle row carefully and decide accordingly. If you are not, the public frame costs you nothing.
6. Location and time zone: don't create a contradiction
Remote hiring stalls on logistics more often than on skills. Your profile location should be where you actually are. Then make the overlap explicit somewhere a human will read it — the About section is the natural place: "Based in Medellín (UTC−5). Overlaps 9am–6pm US Eastern."
Being vague about location to seem closer to the buyer backfires in the first scheduling email. Being precise about overlap is what actually reassures a hiring manager, and it's a theme we cover in how to get a remote job with a US company.
7. Activity: show the work, not the hustle
Since your Activity section surfaces the last 45 days of posts, comments and likes, it functions as a rolling sample of how you think. You do not need to become a creator. A realistic cadence for a job search: one post every two weeks showing something you built or learned, plus a few substantive comments a week in the communities where your target companies live.
Post format that works: the problem, what you tried, what broke, what fixed it, one screenshot. That reads as a practitioner. Motivational posts read as a job seeker.
What LinkedIn does not document
Being honest about this is part of the method. LinkedIn does not publish a search ranking algorithm for candidate discovery, does not publish how recruiters' filters weight profile fields, and does not publish a "best time to post". Claims about any of those are inference at best.
What you can rely on are the documented mechanics above — plus a simple structural fact: recruiters search using words, and read using evidence. Optimise for both and you don't need a secret.
Searching, not just being found
Once the profile is ready, use the search side. LinkedIn's help page on finding remote jobs describes searching from the Jobs tab, describing what you want in your own words, applying the Remote filter on the results page, and turning on the alerts toggle so new matches come to you.
Two additions from our side. First, "remote" on LinkedIn does not mean "remote from anywhere" — many posts are remote within one country. Read the posting for location and work-authorisation language before investing time. Second, filters are a discovery tool, not an application strategy: a tailored application through a company's own careers page, ideally with a referral, still converts better than volume.
A 90-minute pass
- 20 min — headline and About, written against five real job posts.
- 20 min — skills: extract terms from those posts, add the repeats, delete anything you couldn't defend.
- 30 min — Featured: upload your build, walkthrough and case study. If you have none, this becomes your next two weekends.
- 10 min — Open to Work settings and location/overlap line.
- 10 min — save a Remote job search with alerts on.
The Featured section is the part that takes real time, because it requires having done something. That is the point. A profile is a distribution channel for proof — and if you haven't built the proof yet, proof of work vs credentials is the place to start.
Key takeaways
- Headline is index space: use the role you want, in the words employers use.
- Skills are searchable and are promises — list only what you can demonstrate.
- An empty Featured section is a hidden Featured section. Fill it with three artifacts.
- Choose your Open to Work visibility with the documented privacy caveat in mind.
- State your time-zone overlap explicitly, and use the Remote filter with alerts to search.