I was digging into how LinkedIn's new system decides who sees your posts when I opened my own intro settings and found something four years old sitting in there.
Industry: Technology, Information and Internet.
Four years ago I worked at a medtech company (my internship lol).
I must have set it then, and I never opened that dropdown again.
Since then I built a content agency.
My profile was still telling LinkedIn I was in tech.
Five fields travel with your post
When LinkedIn decides who sees a post, five things about the author go with it.
It’s surprisingly not your whole profile.
This is in LinkedIn's own engineering paper on the new feed, Large-Scale Retrieval for the LinkedIn Feed using Causal Language Models, written by their engineers.
Author information: name, headline, company, industry, title.
→ Name
→ Headline
→ Company
→ Industry
→ Title
LinkedIn calls it your author data.
Your About section is talking to people who already found you
Skills, job history, education, certifications, languages.
All of it is used, on the other side of the equation.
It describes you as a reader and helps LinkedIn work out what to put in your feed. It doesn't ride along with your posts into anyone else's.
So the hours people spend rewriting their About section go toward someone who is already on the profile page, already curious, already half decided.
That work converts.
It has no say in who saw the post that sent them there.
Nobody has touched the industry field since signup
Headlines get rewritten every few months.
People agonise over their banner.
Industry is a dropdown you filled in the week you made the account, based on wherever you happened to work at the time.
Mine came from a job I left four years ago.
And it's sitting in the same list of five as the headline we all obsess over.
If your industry says one thing and everything you publish says another, you're handing the system a description of yourself that stopped being true a while ago.
We might as well set ourselves up for success and give the algorithm the right information about who our content should land in front of.
Two minutes, and you only do it once
I changed mine to Business Content.
Profile fields are one of the cheapest things to fix on this platform.
Go and open yours now:
→ Click your photo, then View profile
→ Click the pencil under your name
→ Scroll to Industry
→ Read what it says
Then ask whether it matches the room you want reading you, or the people that employed you in 2022.
While you're in there, look at the other four.
Those five fields are the only description of you the system carries into someone else's feed. Worth making them accurate.
Talk soon,
D.
P.S. Use my free profile optimizer. Fix the whole thing in one sitting. → [OPEN THE PROFILE OPTIMIZER]
P.S.S. What do you want more of around here? Reply and tell me, I read them all.