Inside this issue:
- The gap-filler entry that quietly drops you out of the 1 search you want most (and the hidden LinkedIn tool that catches it in 10 seconds)
- The 7 rules to make your job title findable to headhunters and a hidden tool nobody uses but makes you a LinkedIn title expert
- My Experience Section Optimizer prompt: paste a role, get a job title and a 2,000-character keyword entry back in the format recruiters index
You left your Sales Director role in March. The gap started to bother you in May.
So you added a new entry at the top of your profile: Commercial Excellence Consultant. It looks tidy. It closes the gap.
And it just made you harder to find for every Sales Director search in your market.
I run searches in LinkedIn Recruiter every day. I see this move on senior profiles all the time.
Most executives think the job title field is finished once it’s accurate.
Wrong.
The title line in each experience entry is indexed. Together with your headline, it’s the most heavily weighted pair of fields on your profile.
I lead the global life sciences practice at a top-10 retained firm. This is part 2 of The LinkedIn Fix, the series that rebuilds your profile field by field, in the order recruiters weigh them.
Part 1 fixed the headline. The headline makes the promise. The experience section keeps it.
A recruiter’s search string starts with a job title. LinkedIn Recruiter matches that string against your headline and against the title field of every experience entry.
And 60 to 70% of executive profiles carry at least 1 title no recruiter would ever search for.
The data on who gets found points the same way. In a dataset of 1,750 executive profiles, candidates LinkedIn tags as “Engaged in job market” (the tag behind a 12x jump in recruiter visibility) name their function in 2.3 experience entries on average. Everyone else: 1.7.
Your titles don’t carry equal weight. Recent titles weigh far more than older ones, and your current entry weighs the most of all.
So the entry you add at the top can overwrite what the search finds you for. Sales Director drops to position 2. Commercial Excellence Consultant takes the top slot. And a placeholder role on top of a gap overrides your Open to Work signal, because LinkedIn reads it as a new job.
Then the human side. The results card shows your current title and your last 2 roles. A recruiter scanning for a Sales Director sees a consultant who just started something. They skip.
If you cover a gap, cover it with a title that’s searchable for the role you want next. Or leave the end date off your last role.
Everything below is for paid subscribers: the 7 rules for the title line, the hidden title tool, 3 counted title lines, a full 1,995-character example entry, and the Experience Section Optimizer prompt that writes yours.
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