The profile a stranger checks in ninety seconds

Three surfaces, one job each

Before anybody speaks to you, someone opens two or three tabs. They are not reading. They are answering one question: is this person plausibly the thing the advert describes?

• LinkedIn answers “who is this and are they real”.
• GitHub answers “do they actually build things”.
• One page of your own answers “what have they done and what happened”.

Each has a different job and none of them needs to be impressive. They need to be legible in ninety seconds.

LinkedIn: the top third is the whole thing

On a phone, a recruiter sees your photo, your name, your headline, your location and about two lines of the About section. Everything below is read only if that top third worked.

• Headline. Not your job title, which is already shown. Use the shape what you do · with what · for whom: “Data analyst · SQL and Python · retail and logistics · Nairobi”. A student or career-changer writes what they are doing, not what they lack: “Learning data engineering · building public pipelines with dbt and DuckDB” beats “Aspiring data professional seeking opportunities”, which says only that you are unemployed.
• About. Five sentences, first person, plain. What you do, one thing you have built, what you are looking for. No third-person biography, no adjectives about passion.
• Open to work. The recruiter-visible setting costs nothing. The green banner is a separate choice; it is visible to everyone including your current employer, and people have been caught out by that.
• Location. Set it to where you actually are. An inaccurate location wastes everybody’s time and is discovered in the first minute of the first call.

On photographs, markets differ, and the difference is legal rather than aesthetic. In the United States and United Kingdom, CVs conventionally carry no photograph because employers actively avoid material that could support a discrimination claim. In much of continental Europe, South Asia and Latin America a photograph is normal. On LinkedIn, have one everywhere; on a CV, follow the local convention.

GitHub: the pinned six

The profile page shows six pinned repositories and a README you control. That README is the highest-leverage paragraph you own on the internet and almost nobody writes one. Four lines: what you work on, three links to your best repositories with one sentence each, and how to contact you.

What a reviewer actually checks, in order: does the top repository have a README that says what it does and how to run it; does the code run; are there commits over several days rather than one enormous dump; is there a test file anywhere.

The contribution graph is largely folklore. Nobody serious rejects a candidate for pale squares, and a wall of green from automated commits is transparent and slightly embarrassing. Three finished, documented projects beat four hundred days of streak.

Your own page

One page, no framework, no build step. A heading, two sentences about you, three projects with a paragraph each ending in what happened, and a contact line. GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages and Netlify all host it free on a custom domain; a domain costs around ten dollars a year and is optional.

The mistake is building a portfolio site instead of writing up the work. A beautiful site with three unexplained repositories is worth less than an ugly page with three honest write-ups, because the reviewer is buying judgement and only one of those shows any.

The consistency check nobody mentions

A recruiter with two tabs open compares them. Dates that disagree between CV and LinkedIn, a title that is grander in one place, a project that appears on the site and nowhere else: each is a small question mark, and three of them is a reason to move on. Make the three surfaces say the same thing, and put the most detail in the one you control.

The limitation

Returns diminish steeply. An afternoon on these three surfaces is worth it; a second week is procrastination wearing a productive hat. Profiles cannot make a case that the underlying work does not support, and the only reliable way to improve them further is to go and do something worth writing about.