I met a guy recently. Sweet guy. Job searching.
His LinkedIn profile? Disaster.
Not “needs a tune-up” disaster. Not “missing a few keywords” disaster.
I’m talking every single available character used. About section: maxed. Experience section: maxed. 20+ bullet points per role. Every. Single. Task he’d ever done. Listed.
“Analyzed supply chain metrics.” “Tracked supply chain data.” “Managed supply chain.”
Call me Captain Obvious but wouldn’t a supply chain analyst be responsible for…analyzing supply chains? And wouldn’t analyzing supply chains involve reviewing all the components of a supply chain?
You can see where I’m going with this.
I made it about two bullets in before my eyes glazed over. And I was actively trying to help him.
When I told him his profile was unreadable, that it was a wall of obvious tasks with no story, no Red Thread, nothing that made him stand out among his peers, he said:
“My career coach told me to include everything I’ve ever done. Every detail. Every responsibility. They said you should use every available space.”
Every. Available. Space.
He’d been working with this career coach “for a while.” He still didn’t have a job. But he was sticking with the coach.
Sounds like a plan, dude. You do you.
Why stuffing your LinkedIn profile with every detail backfires
I want to address this directly because I keep running into people who got this same playbook from someone calling themselves a LinkedIn expert.
“Add as many details as possible. Use every available section. More is more.”
No. More is noise.
Your LinkedIn profile is not your resume’s bigger cousin with the unlimited word count. It’s not a place to dump everything you’ve ever done in the hopes that something sticks.
It’s a place where a human (recruiter, prospective client, peer, whoever) needs to be able to look at your profile and figure out two things very quickly:
- What you actually do
- Why you’re good at it
If they have to wade through 20 bullet points of “analyzed metrics” / “tracked data” / “managed processes” to figure that out, they don’t. They click away and move on to the next candidate. There is always another candidate.
Your profile didn’t sell you. It buried you.
The fix is strategic detail, not maximum detail.
The supply chain analyst’s profile doesn’t need 20 bullets. It needs maybe 4-6 that say things like “Caught a $2M sourcing error before it hit production” or “Cut our average lead time by 11 days across a 40-supplier network.”
Specific. Quantified. Memorable.
But that takes work. That takes thinking. The career coach version (use every available space) is the lazy version based on old methods. Dump everything. Hope something sticks. Charge the client either way.
Why keyword-stuffing your LinkedIn profile doesn’t work
There’s another version of this same problem, served from the other direction:
“Just optimize for the AI scanners. Keywords are all that matter.”
Also no.
Yes, LinkedIn’s AI crawls your profile. Yes, keywords matter. Yes, you should use them in your skills, your headline, your About section. But if the AI surfaces you and a human clicks through and finds an unreadable wall of keyword-stuffed text, the human bounces in about three seconds.
The AI got you to the door. The human decides whether to walk through it.
You have to be fluent in both languages: AI keywords AND human-readable narrative. Either one alone doesn’t work.
(I have an entire framework about this. Optimize for AI AND the human eye. It rhymes. Yes, on purpose. Because I want you to remember this.)
Why career coaches keep getting LinkedIn wrong
I don’t want to throw all career coaches under the bus. Some of them are great at what they do. Resume strategy, interview prep, salary negotiation, career trajectory planning. There are coaches doing excellent work on those things every day.
But LinkedIn is not those things. LinkedIn is a dynamic, three-dimensional platform with its own AI, its own algorithm, its own visual rules, and its own audience expectations.
A LinkedIn profile is not a resume. A LinkedIn profile is not a longer resume. A LinkedIn profile is not a resume with more bullet points and a headshot.
If a coach is treating it like a resume, they’re out of their lane. The advice they give you for your profile is probably the same advice they’d give you for your resume, scaled up. And it doesn’t work because LinkedIn isn’t a resume platform.
The supply chain analyst, last seen
He didn’t change a thing. He told me he trusted his career coach more.
I’m pretty sure he’s still looking.
(He was sweet, though. Offered to share my free events, if I ever have any.)
The 30-second LinkedIn profile test
If you’re staring at your LinkedIn profile and wondering whether yours is the supply-chain-analyst version of itself, here’s the test:
Open your profile. Pretend you’ve never met yourself. Read it like a stranger would, in about 30 seconds.
Can you tell what this person does? Can you tell why they’re good at it? Can you find a single specific thing — a number, a project, a moment — that makes them memorable?
If the answer to any of those is no, your profile has the same problem he did. The fix isn’t to add more. The fix is to cut everything that isn’t earning its place and put real signal in what’s left.
Career coaches who tell you otherwise are out of their lane. Don’t let them ruin your LinkedIn profile because they don’t understand the platform they’re advising you on.