Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn. So when he sat down with Inc’s then Editor-in-Chief Eric Schurenberg to talk about what people get wrong on the platform, it was worth writing down.
He did not start with formatting. He did not start with keywords. He started with a question:
“What is your strategy for being found?”
Sit with that for a second, because it quietly rearranges everything.
Your profile is a search result before it is a page
Most people write their LinkedIn profile as though someone has already arrived. As though a person is sitting there, scrolling patiently, ready to be impressed by a career history.
That is not how it happens.
Before anybody reads your profile, they have to find it. And on a platform now past a billion members, being found is not a passive event. It is a design problem, and the person who built the thing is telling you it is the one you should be solving.
Hoffman’s framing is that we live in a networked age, so the ability to be found matters. Which means the raw material of your profile, the words and the specifics, is not decoration. It is what the search engine has to work with.
Fill it in thinly and you are not being modest. You are being invisible.
Write for the person you want to find you, not for everyone
The second thing Hoffman said is that you should have a goal for your profile. He looks at who he wants his own profile to appeal to, and writes toward those people.
That is the whole game, and almost nobody does it.
Go and read three profiles in your industry right now. They will read like a summary of a career. Job, job, job, a skills list, a line about being passionate. Written for nobody in particular, which means written for nobody.
A profile with a target reads differently. It names an audience. It names what that audience is trying to get done. Somebody outside that audience bounces off it, and that is the point.
I have spent since 2012 doing this for a living, across hundreds of B2B niches, and the pattern never breaks: the profiles that pull are the ones that repel most people on purpose.
If you want the actual sentence structure for that, it is all in how to write a LinkedIn summary that works like a sales asset. This post is about why it matters. That one is about how.
“Don’t be generic; be unique”
That is Hoffman’s line, five words, and it has aged into something he could not have predicted.
When he said it, being generic was a writing habit. A bit of laziness. You could fix it with an afternoon and some honesty.
Now generic is the default output of every tool pointed at LinkedIn. A profile written by a machine that has never met you, in the voice of nobody, saying the things everybody says. The bar for sounding like a real person has never been lower to clear, and almost nobody clears it.
So the co-founder’s advice has quietly become the highest-leverage thing on the platform. Not because being unique got more valuable, but because everything around it got more identical.
Your story is the one input your competitors cannot buy, copy or generate. Whatever made you interesting before you had a job title is probably the thing that makes someone reply.
Let other people say it for you
Hoffman’s fourth point was about endorsements and recommendations, and his reasoning is more interesting than the feature.
LinkedIn attaches a real name, a real face and a real profile to every recommendation somebody writes. That is deliberate. It creates a cost to lying, because the lie is public and it is signed.
Which is why a recommendation on LinkedIn carries weight that a testimonial on your own website never will. You wrote that one. Somebody else wrote this one, in public, with their name on it.
Two practical things follow.
Ask for them, specifically. Not “would you write me a recommendation,” which produces four vague sentences. Ask the person to describe the problem you solved and what changed. You will get something a prospect can actually use.
Use full names everywhere else too. If a testimonial on your profile or your site has no full name and no company, a prospect assumes you made it up. Not “might assume.” Assumes.
What has changed, and what has not
The interview is a decade old. The platform has moved a long way since: a billion-plus members, a different feed, features that came and went.
Not one of Hoffman’s four points has moved.
Be findable. Have a target. Be unmistakably yourself. Let other people vouch for you in public.
That list has survived every redesign, every algorithm change and the arrival of tools that can write a profile in nine seconds. It survives because it is not really about LinkedIn. It is about how people decide who to trust, and that has not changed since long before any of this existed.
What to do with this
Open your own profile and ask Hoffman’s question about it. Not “does this look good.” What is my strategy for being found, and by whom?
If you cannot name the person in one sentence, that is the work. Everything else is formatting.
Then two follow-ons: the headline formula that does most of the heavy lifting, and what a profile actually needs to look like now.
Or, if you would rather not do it yourself, that is exactly how our LinkedIn lead generation works for consultants. We interview you like a reporter, write the profile in your voice, then run the outreach behind it. You show up for the calls.
Source: Reid Hoffman in conversation with Inc. Editor-in-Chief Eric Schurenberg, “The Biggest LinkedIn Profile Mistakes You Can Make.”
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