How to Use LinkedIn to Search & Land a Job in 2026

0:00You can't find a job on LinkedIn because you're following outdated advice. And as someone who's hired thousands of people, most of them through LinkedIn, here are 10 things you need to do to finally land your job. Number eight and nine are most [music] important. The first thing you want to focus on is profile optimization. Getting found by recruiters. These are the minimum requirements and keyword strategies for you to be discovered by recruiters that are using LinkedIn search tools. All right. So, how do I make my LinkedIn profile stand out so that recruiters find me? First, understand that recruiters don't use regular LinkedIn like you do. They use LinkedIn

0:33Recruiter, a different interface that costs anywhere from a few hundred bucks to tens of thousands of dollars. So, what's the major difference? They can see people who are open to work. And I'll explain what that really means in a second. When recruiters search, they see your headsh shot, your name, and headline first. But they can search by anything. current title, past title, companies, schools, connections, skills,

0:55or keywords across your entire profile. They build complex query strings and check them daily. LinkedIn can even send them notifications when someone matching their criteria updates their profile and changes it open to work. That's why constantly updating and enriching your profile can go a long way. Add keywords naturally. Don't stuff them incoherently by putting in a whole bunch of extra keywords, but keep adding relevant terms to help recruiters find you. You want to make sure your profile is optimized so you show up in those first 20 to 30

1:25people that the recruiter is screening. All right, next. Should I use features like open to work or not? Here's the truth. Way more people than you realize have open to work enabled. They just have the green banner turned off. When you enable open to work, you can choose to show it to only recruiters and not everyone. Don't worry about your current employer seeing it. LinkedIn will exclude you from any of their search results as long as you have the same employer as the person using LinkedIn recruiter. So you want to make sure you have that correct. The open to work candidates shows up as a big shiny box

1:56in LinkedIn recruiter. And recruiters love this because they want responses. They don't want to tease someone out of a happy job. If you're open to work, they know you're more likely to respond. So it is a great feature to use and you can decide if you want to use the green banner or not. LinkedIn also shows recruiters a likelihood to respond. It's a score based on your activity, whether you visited the company page and if you answer DMs. Your activity and settings make a huge difference in how recruiters discover you on LinkedIn recruiter. To give you some perspective, when I was searching for engineers, I'd get close

2:27to 5,000 matches, and it was virtually impossible to go through everyone. So, being able to filter for people that had open to work made a huge difference for me. All right, let's talk about what keywords and skills you should use on your LinkedIn to match job postings in 2026. You're going to want to look at the jobs you want. Check the keywords they emphasize. LinkedIn has a match score that can help you. But here's also where Teal comes in. At Teal, we've developed a keyword matching and resume analysis tool, and you can use that to optimize your content and update your LinkedIn profile with those same

2:58keywords. Now, what if you're pivoting? How do you tail your LinkedIn profile if you're changing careers? You can't dynamically change your LinkedIn for each job like you can on a resume. So you need to bridge the language gap going from marketing to product management. Talk about how you manage projects in your marketing roles, how you rolled out website projects like a product. You want to mention metrics like activation, conversion, time on site. Project your voice in that new occupation. You want to use the language they use so they can see you're familiar. The same goes for domain switches. moving from hospitality or to transportation, talk about activities

3:33that show your understanding of that new space. Build these bridges for the reader. That's critical when you're pivoting. Don't put the work on them. They're not going to give you the benefit of the doubt. The professional summary is key for pivoters. It's right at the top where you make your pitch. You want to hook them so they'll read the rest of your profile. Moving on to advanced search and application strategy. All right, so you're going to

3:54stop making lowquality applications. These are the efficient, high impact search methods that really help you land jobs. So, how are you going to use LinkedIn's job search filters effectively? First, you want to sort by most recent. Timing is everything. Search for your target job title, but remember, LinkedIn doesn't handle synonyms well. So, you might want to use tools like ChatBT or Claude or Gemini and ask it to generate alternative titles for you. That's going to help you open up the aperture of your search. If you're not quite sure what to do there, you can paste your resume in and ask it for what other job titles might make

4:25sense for you. Then you can use search operators, things like quotation marks to get exact matches. So when you're searching, you can put in just a job title alone. Here we have product operations manager. And you can see when I hit enter, I get jobs, but I'm getting also alternative titles. If you want a more fuzzy search, that's good. If you want to get pretty specific, you can put quotation marks around the search. And now you'll see that I'm getting product operations manager specifically in every job title. And then you can combine that with and or not operators to refine your search. As an example, if you don't want

4:59to see a company, you can put not in front of it and it'll exclude it from the search results. And you can access the advanced filters by going to the all filters and you can search for companies, benefits, salary ranges. What I recommend is you set these up and bookmark the URL so it's quick for you to come back and just do the same search every day. I also recommend that you check out other job boards. On Teal in particular, we have one that gives you tons of filters and facets that allows you to get down to very specific queries and it gets new jobs every hour. And

5:27it's also different and that has no sponsored job posts. We take it on ourselves to go and find every job under the sun for you. All right, check it out and let us know what you think in the comments. So, next you want to think about Easy Apply and if you should use it or you should apply directly on company websites. Here's the thing. Easy Apply lowered the friction for everyone, which is awesome, but it created a lot of noise. You get lost in that noise now. So, I prefer going as close to the source as possible. For knowledge work jobs or office jobs, go to the company

5:55website. You'll see the full application, the questions they care about, and there will be no intermediary or middle person. I think this applies to any job board like Indeed, Zip Recruiter, or whatever. Why take any chances? My recommendation is always go directly to the company website. So, how do I use LinkedIn's new AI feature to my advantage? All right, LinkedIn recently released an AI powered job search tool with natural language queries. Remember,

6:19LinkedIn ultimately serves companies. They make money from when recruiters post jobs. So, you'll see a lot of promoted jobs in there, but these AI features let you search more naturally. That's going to enable you to focus less on filters and facets and just type in what you want. Early test, I think it's pretty promising and I like it a lot. Teal also has a new job search capability. And if you imagine like all the jobs in LinkedIn and chat GPT together, it allows you to chat with it, get career advice, but leverage this massive database of job descriptions to help you find jobs and position yourself

6:48for them. I'm going to link to it in the description. Give it a shot. It's totally free for now, so would love your feedback. Moving on to the recruiter and hiring manager perspective. As the former chief growth officer at Weiwork and now Teal's founder, I know what hiring managers actually look for on LinkedIn. They look for competence and

7:05professionalism. They find you two ways. Sourcing, when they're actively searching, or via your resume. They click the link and then you send them there. Those people are already interested and they're looking to learn more about you. What they're immediately going to check is what's above the fold. What loads before they ever scroll? Your headshot, is it professional? Your banner, is it empty? If that does, it signals you don't really maintain your profile. Just add an image. It's super simple. Your name. Add pronouns, degrees, or any postnominals if you'd like. Then your headline. This is your statement. Don't ever put anything like

7:36seeking opportunities or pivoting. That's going to create objections for them. You want to convey confidence using every character you have. As an example, senior product manager, 15 years experience, expert in product management, agile, and go to market activation. That's it. It's got some keyword, the title, and it encapsulates your years of experience. Your professional summary. Those first three lines are everything. Make them punchy and compelling. Don't repeat your headline. Build on it. If you hook them there, they'll check your work experience. Don't just list companies and titles. Add descriptions and bullets. Copy your resume content and add more detail. The first two to three

8:12lines before the see more are crucial. And your five most recent positions show by default. Make them count. Then the skill section. Add every software skill and ability. Don't worry about endorsements. Just get them in LinkedIn's database for searchability. If you can get the endorsements, great. But don't let them be a blocker. Then after your core profile sections, they might check your activity, posts, and comments. So you want to show your expertise and engagement there. But I'll get more on that in a minute. So how

8:38much does networking matter on LinkedIn? It matters a lot. People see your connection count and common connections. And then those connections become people you can DM and leverage for introductions and referrals. Also, when someone searches your profile, they're going to see mutual connections, and that's going to trigger familiarity bias. If they're connected, they must be good. And you can draft off that halo effect. You want to connect with fellow alumni, classmates, co-workers, managers, relatives, everyone. LinkedIn doesn't share email addresses anymore, so there's really little downside. If someone abuses the connection, then just remove them. In LinkedIn Recruiter, people can filter by first and second degree connections. So, you want to

9:15maximize your network. When you interview, connect immediately. Connect with hiring managers in advance. They'll appreciate the productivity and the research you're doing. There's really zero downside. Networking is really important for job seekers because it builds trust and relationships with people who will occasionally offer positions or employment opportunities. I'm going to create a video especially about how to handle networking even if you're not an extrovert. Subscribe cuz you don't want to miss it. Engagement and visibility. The long game. You should use the platform's social features to maintain visibility and reinforce your authority. How often should I post, comment, or engage if I'm actively job searching? You don't have

9:49to engage, but to maximize LinkedIn, it helps to be present. A dormant profile where someone hasn't commented in two years kind of looks abandoned and they might think you won't answer your DMs. So, I recommend you start simple. Just like posts, use reactions, make small comments. To go further, you can share articles without commentary or repost other people's content. If you're looking to build a personal brand, post

10:11once a week. Show thought leadership. Comment on new tools, technologies, industry news. This shows you're plugged in and keep up with industry trends. Personally, I'd avoid content that triggers negative reactions unless it aligns with companies you're targeting. You may want to be at a company that works on more controversial themes. LinkedIn generally isn't the place for controversial content, but don't dampen your voice. If it helps you attract the right employers, go for it. And for engagement frequency, for passive actions like liking and commenting, once daily is pretty good. For posting, once or twice a week could be a great way to get going. All this advice can be

10:43summarized into a three-step process. Optimize your profile, search and target the right jobs, and engage on the platform to maintain visibility. The entire job search process can be pretty tedious, but using LinkedIn can really make it easier. So, there's really no downside to engaging in it. Why risk it? And that's why I always recommend using Teal. It makes the entire process easier by performing the keyword matching, profile comparison, and customization steps I mentioned earlier, and it makes your job search faster and way more effective. And it's a great pairing for LinkedIn. If you want to try it for

11:14free, check the link in the description. You can also get a special discount if you want to upgrade and access our better tools. All right, thanks and I'll see you next time.