Recruiters don't find candidates by luck. They type searches: job titles, skills, locations, companies. If your profiles don't contain the words they search for, you don't exist for that role. And once they find you, you get a few seconds to look like the obvious shortlist. This guide covers both halves: being found, and being chosen.
How recruiters search today
Most sourcing still starts in LinkedIn Recruiter, filtering by title, skills, location and current company. Many recruiters also run Google searches restricted to LinkedIn or GitHub profiles, with Boolean operators like quotes and OR. More and more are asking AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini) questions like "senior React developers in Pune who've worked on payments".
All three methods reward the same thing: clear, consistent words on public pages. Your current title, the title you want, your main skills and your city should appear on your LinkedIn, on your personal page and in your résumé, written the same way each time.
Step 1: choose the words you want to be found for
Pick the job title recruiters actually use for the role you want, not your company's internal title. "Member of Technical Staff 3" means nothing in a search; "Senior Backend Engineer" does. Look at ten job posts for your target role and note the titles and skills that repeat. Those are your keywords.
Put the title in your LinkedIn headline, your page headline and the first line of your résumé. Put the top three to five skills in your About section and on your page, in sentences rather than a wall of tags. A free LinkedIn headline generator can give you options to react to.
Step 2: have a page that answers the recruiter's real questions
When a recruiter lands on your page, they're checking five things, usually in this order:
- Is this person the level I need? (Years, scope, title.)
- Have they done this kind of work? (Projects or results that match the role.)
- Is the claim credible? (Numbers, names, links, quotes.)
- Are they likely open to a move? (Availability, location, notice.)
- How do I reach them fast? (Email, booking link, phone.)
Step 3: connect your profiles so you're one person online
Search engines and AI assistants build a picture of a person from many pages. If your LinkedIn, GitHub, personal page and conference bio all link to each other and describe you the same way, they're understood as one person, and your page is more likely to appear when someone searches your name.
Practically: add your personal page to LinkedIn's website field and your contact info, to your GitHub profile, and to your email signature. Link back to them from your page. Use the same name everywhere, including middle initials.
Step 4: check whether AI assistants know you
Ask an AI assistant with web search "Who is [your name], [role] in [city]?" and "Who are some good [role]s in [city]?" If the first answer is vague or mixes you up with someone else, the public web doesn't describe you clearly yet. If the second never names you, you're not in the sources it reads. Our free AI visibility checker runs these questions for you.
No one can make an AI assistant recommend you, and anyone promising that is selling something. What you can do is make accurate, consistent information about you easy to find. That's the same work as the steps above.
Step 5: make the first message easy
Recruiters juggle dozens of roles. A booking link on your page ("15-minute intro call") removes a round of emails. If you're actively looking, say so on the page with the roles and locations you want. If you're not, say what would make you move. Both save everyone time.
When you apply or reply, send your page with the résumé. On featurd you can make a tracked link for each recruiter and see when they open it. That tells you when a follow-up is welcome and when the role has gone quiet.
What not to do
- Don't stuff your headline with every buzzword. Recruiters read it, and it looks desperate.
- Don't claim results you can't back up in an interview. A single inflated number undoes the rest.
- Don't let profiles disagree on titles or dates. It looks careless, and to a machine it looks like two people.
- Don't hide your city if location matters for the role. Many searches filter on it.