Want to stand out on LinkedIn? Try this career strategist’s top 3 tips for strengthening your profile


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Every minute, LinkedIn users submit just north of 8,000 job applications, according to company data.

For job seekers, that can feel like a daunting number, especially as headlines about layoffs seem to infiltrate news feeds at a similar rate. 

While LinkedIn isn’t the only platform for searching job ads, it’s the most popular, with a global user base of over one billion. So if you haven’t updated your LinkedIn profile in a while, whether you’re actively seeking employment or not, it’s time for a refresh. 

Also: ‘Job seekers have to be detectives’: 3 signs that listing is a scam

“People want to see that you have a digital footprint and see that you have more context about who you are,” said Sam Wright, head of career strategy at Huntr, a company that specializes in job search tools. 

Here are three quick ways — plus one bonus round — to clean up your LinkedIn profile. 

1. Emphasize your most important facts and stats

Think about the information you want a potential employer to know about you first, and make sure they can see it fast. 

If you have impressive facts or stats, make sure no one has to dig into your profile to find them. In part, that means using your headline and about section. 

The headline, for example, can go beyond your current job title. A post on LinkedIn profiles from the University of Washington advised professionals to use 10 to 15 words to describe both career focus and top skills.

Also: Job hunting? 5 ways you can stand out in 2026 – and beat AI screening tools

Wright recommended compiling your achievements and crafting a few sentences highlighting them for the about section.

“I like to remind people that we all have TikTok brains, eight-second attention spans — hiring managers and recruiters included,” Wright said. 

If finding your most important information requires too much scrolling and clicking, odds are, a recruiter or hiring manager might not get there. 

2. Be detailed

On your resume, you probably go into specifics about your past positions, not only describing your title and length of employment, but also your key achievements and responsibilities. 

Make sure that information is also on your LinkedIn profile.

A 2025 guide from Rutgers University suggested using strong verbs and bolstering those bullet points with measurable numbers to tell what it calls your “professional story.” 

Also: Job hunting? Nothing beats human networks – here are 8 places to start

You should answer the question of what you actually did in your job.

Wright said that information helps with visibility, and it’s easy to add since you’ve already got it on your resume. 

3. Remember your audience

You’ve likely seen rants on LinkedIn. Particularly after something like a layoff, you might be tempted to vent your work-related frustrations on the platform. 

In short, don’t. 

Also: AI buzzwords are making the job hunt harder – for everyone

Remember that if you’re on the job hunt, your target audience is recruiters and potential employers. Rants, however justified or deeply felt, are better suited for friends and family.

“You want to promote yourself as a professional that somebody wants to work with,” Wright said.

And if you’ve posted a screed in the past, it’s worth going back through old posts and deleting anything that might not represent you well. 

While you’re at it, you can use our guide to make sure your online presence beyond LinkedIn won’t get you disqualified from a job you want, either. 

Bonus round: Refresh often

Even if you’re not on the job hunt at the moment, it’s important to keep your LinkedIn profile polished and up-to-date.

Wright suggested a good time to revisit your profile is around when you do performance reviews at work. That way, you have your most recent stats and accomplishments at hand, and should you suffer a layoff or decide to start looking for a new gig, your profile is ready to go.





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Recent Reviews


A new class-action lawsuit, filed on Monday by three teenage girls and their guardians, alleges that Elon Musk’s xAI created and distributed child sexual abuse material featuring their faces and likenesses with its Grok AI tech.

“Their lives have been shattered by the devastating loss of privacy, dignity, and personal safety that the production and dissemination of this CSAM have caused,” the filing says. “xAI’s financial gain through the increased use of its image- and video-making product came at their expense and well-being.”

From December to early January, Grok allowed many AI and X social media users to create AI-generated nonconsensual intimate images, sometimes known as deepfake porn. Reports estimate that Grok users made 4.4 million “undressed” or “nudified” images, 41% of the total number of images created, over a period of nine days. 

X, xAI and its safety and child safety divisions did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The wave of “undressed” images stirred outrage around the world. The European Commission quickly launched an investigation, while Malaysia and Indonesia banned X within their borders. Some US government representatives called on Apple and Google to remove the app from their app stores for violating their policies, but no federal investigation into X or xAI has been opened. A similar, separate class-action lawsuit was filed (PDF) by a South Carolina woman in late January.

The dehumanizing trend highlighted just how capable modern AI image tools are at creating content that seems realistic. The new complaint compares Grok’s self-proclaimed “spicy AI” generation to the “dark arts” with its ease of subjecting children to “any pose, however sick, however fetishized, however unlawful.”

“To the viewer, the resulting video appears entirely real. For the child, her identifying features will now forever be attached to a video depicting her own child sexual abuse,” the complaint reads.

AI Atlas

The complaint says xAI is at fault because it did not employ industry-standard guardrails that would prevent abusers from making this content. It says xAI licensed use of its tech to third-party companies abroad, which sold subscriptions that led abusers to make child sexual abuse images featuring the faces and likenesses of the victims. The requests ran through xAI’s servers, which makes the company liable, the complaint argues.

The lawsuit was filed by three Jane Does, pseudonyms given to the teens to protect their identities. Jane Doe 1 was first alerted to the fact that abusive, AI-generated sexual material of her was circulating on the web by an anonymous Instagram message in early December. The filing says she was told about a Discord server by the anonymous Instagram user, where the material was shared. That led Jane Doe 1 and her family, and eventually law enforcement, to find and arrest one perpetrator.

Ongoing investigations led the families of Jane Does 2 and 3 to learn their children’s images had been transformed with xAI tech into abusive material.





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