They opened your email. Then they opened LinkedIn.

A hiring manager I used to work alongside in staffing had a habit I still think about. After a BD email from a recruiter she didn't know, she wouldn't reply from the inbox. She'd click the name.

That second look decides more than most agency owners realise. Not because LinkedIn is magic, but because a stranger has just been asked to trust you with a hire, and your profile is the only evidence they can check in twenty seconds.

Here's the path they usually take.

• Photo. They don't need a studio shot. They need to see a real person, looking at the camera, in something you'd wear to a client meeting. A cropped holiday photo, or no photo at all, makes the email feel like it came from a mailbox, not a person.
• Headline. This is the one that loses the most people. If it says “Recruitment Consultant | Connecting talent with opportunity”, you've told them you work in recruitment and almost nothing else. They already knew that from your email. They want to know: who do you hire for, and for whom?
• The About section's first three lines. LinkedIn hides the rest behind “see more”. If those lines are “I'm a passionate, results-driven recruiter with X years of experience”, most hiring managers never click. Use the opening to name the person you help, the roles you fill, and the moment they usually call you.
• Activity. If they click through and the last thing on your profile is a job advert from five weeks ago, or nothing at all, the email's work is largely undone. Silence reads as “this person isn't really in the market.” A feed of vacancies reads as “this person is talking to candidates, not to me.”

You don't need a content calendar to fix this. You need the profile to make sense to the person who just received your email, and one useful post that shows how you work.

If you only change one other thing after the headline, change those first three lines of the About section. An illustrative opening, written for a finance recruiter in Australia, looks like this:

Illustrative I find finance leaders for freight and logistics companies in Australia, from Financial Controllers through to CFOs. I usually get the call when a role has been open for weeks and a good controller from another sector would take a year to learn the industry. Here's how I run that search.

Everything after that — your process, your background, how to reach you — is for the people who already clicked “see more”.

This week's profile fix: rewrite the headline for the person who pays you

A simple structure, in this order:

1. Who you help — the company type, or the person who hires.
2. What you hire for — the roles, in their language.
3. Why you, in a few words — a background, a niche, or a way you work.

Put the most important words first. LinkedIn often cuts headlines short in search results and comments, so “Recruitment Consultant” as the first two words is wasted space if you want clients.

More examples by niche and city: LinkedIn headline examples for recruiters.

This week's post idea

List four or five of your real intake questions, and one sentence on why each one matters. A hiring manager reading that can tell, immediately, whether you'd be careful with their role. That's worth more than another “we're hiring” post.

If you try either of these this week, I'd love to hear what you changed.

See you next Monday,
Rupesh
Founder, PoisedHQ