The LinkedIn profile checklist, ordered by what moves a buyer

An unweighted checklist is a to-do list, and it sends you to the wrong end

The checklists that rank for this query run from twenty one to forty items, all presented at the same size, in no particular order. That format has a specific failure mode. People start at item one, work down, and run out of energy somewhere around the skills section, having spent their best two hours on a custom URL and an industry field.

The defect is not the items. Most of them belong on the list. The defect is that a flat list implies equal weight, and the weights here are wildly unequal. A handful of items decide whether a stranger keeps reading. The rest are read only by people who have already decided to keep reading, which makes them real but secondary.

The second defect is sequencing. Almost every published checklist puts the About section before the positioning work, which guarantees that you write About twice. Weighting tells you where to spend. Order tells you when. You need both.

Only three items decide, and there is a test for which ones qualify

An item is decisive if a stranger sees it before choosing whether to scroll. That is the entire test, and it produces exactly three items on a modern profile: the headline, the first two lines of your About section, and the first item in your featured row.

1. The headline. It travels further than anything else you own. It appears under your name in search results, under your name on every comment you leave, inside the connection request the other person is deciding whether to accept, and in the notification when you publish. No other field is displayed in that many places, and in most of them it is truncated, which is why the first fragment carries the whole load.
2. The first two lines of About. Everything after them sits behind a see more link that most readers never press. Those two lines are not an introduction to the About section. They are the About section, and the rest is for the minority who expanded it.
3. The first featured item. It is the only place on a profile where you can show a thing rather than describe one. Position one is what gets clicked. Positions two and three exist for the reader who is already convinced and looking for a reason to say so internally.

Notice what the test excludes. Your banner is seen before all three of those, and it is still not decisive, because a banner cannot be searched, cannot be quoted, and gets cropped differently on every device. It supports. It does not decide. This is also why profiles that get plenty of traffic can still be silent, a pattern examined in views arriving without any messages.

Every element inherits its words from the one above it

Profile elements are not independent. They form a chain, and each one inherits vocabulary, claims and proof from the level above. Edit out of order and you invalidate work you have already done.

The rule that falls out of this: work top down, and when you feel the urge to fix a lower level first because it is easier, that urge is exactly the trap. Level 6 is easy precisely because it depends on nothing, and depending on nothing is another way of saying it changes nothing.

What editing out of order actually costs

Here is the rework arithmetic. The times below are assumptions from a typical rewrite session and you should replace them with your own, but the shape of the result holds at any values.

Assumed drafting times for one rewrite pass. Substitute your own figures.

Start at the About section, as almost every published checklist tells you to, then change your positioning line two days later once the writing has clarified your thinking. You now redo the headline, About, featured and the role description: 110 minutes of rework on a 140 minute job. Work in inheritance order and the rework is zero, because the positioning line was settled before anything inherited from it.

The insight is not that rewriting is bad. Rewriting is how you find the claim. The insight is that the finding should happen in a notes file where rework costs nothing, rather than in the About field where it costs an hour and a half.

The checklist, tiered

Same items you have seen elsewhere, sorted into three tiers by the test in section two. Work the decisive tier until it is genuinely good before you touch the others.

That last hygiene item is the one people skip and the one that finds the most errors. The logged out view hides sections, truncates differently, and is the version most first-time readers get.

Score your profile out of twenty

Weighted scoring makes an uncomfortable point visible: a profile that is perfect on hygiene and weak on the decisive tier cannot pass, no matter how many items it ticks.

The weighting. Twelve of the twenty points sit on three items.

• Score each decisive item 0, 2 or 4. Zero means a stranger could not answer what you sell. Two means they could guess. Four means they could repeat it to a colleague in your words.
• Score each supporting item 0 or 1. There is no partial credit, because a banner that half works is a banner that does not work.
• Hygiene is all or nothing at 0.25 a piece, and it takes an hour to move from zero to three points, which is the best return in the entire list once the decisive tier is done.
• Sixteen and above is a profile doing its job. Twelve to fifteen has one broken decisive item and you will know which. Below twelve, stop editing fields and go back to level 0.

Run the arithmetic on the classic complete profile: every hygiene item ticked, three of five supporting items good, and two out of four on each decisive item. That scores three plus three plus six, which is twelve out of twenty, from a profile the platform itself would call complete. Completeness and persuasion are measured on different instruments.

Where to spend the time you have

Spending equal time on every item is the most common way a rewrite goes wrong, and the arithmetic shows why. Twenty items at fifteen minutes each is five hours, of which three hours go to hygiene, which is worth three of the twenty points.

Two ways to spend roughly the same five hours.

Both columns cost about five hours. The second one finishes the twelve points that matter and still clears the hygiene list, because five minutes really is enough to claim a URL. The first spends its freshest attention on the cheapest points.

One caveat on cadence. A finished profile does not need weekly maintenance, and the instinct to keep polishing it is usually displaced energy that belongs in posting or in conversations. If you are tempted to re-edit monthly, put that hour into when to post for reach instead.

What to do when two items contradict each other

The higher level in the inheritance order wins, and the lower item is rewritten to match. That single rule settles almost every conflict people get stuck on, and it stops the endless loop of changing the headline to suit the About section and then changing the About section back.

Common conflicts, resolved by inheritance order.

The one conflict this rule does not settle is a positioning line you do not believe. No ordering fixes that, and no amount of rewriting the fields underneath it will hide it. Settle the sentence first, then let the whole page inherit from something you can defend, which is the point at which profile as a conversion step becomes a reasonable thing to attempt.