Do you, like me, feel that improving your LinkedIn profile is a boring and tedious chore? Well, these new AI tools certainly make the task more manageable and even a little fun. So join me as I use free AI tools to improve my LinkedIn.

[Optional] Step 0: Analyze Your LinkedIn Profile Using AI

Keeping in line with the overall AI theme of this article, I wanted to have my LinkedIn profile analyzed and rated by an AI tool and see what it had to say. I checked multiple tools and foundTaplio’s LinkedIn Profile Optimizationtool the most comprehensive, with feedback that adheres to the best practices.

The tool is free to use, and you can certainly check it out to get some pointers. However, this is not a necessary step. In fact, a more useful step would be to manually checka few prolific LinkedIn accountsin your field and see how they have set up their profiles. You can take inspiration from those accounts and optimize your LinkedIn accordingly. Alternatively, you can consult your friends and colleagues and get their feedback on your profile.

Overview of the LinkedIn Profile Optimization tool by Taplio

As a rule of thumb, your LinkedIn profile is solid if it checks the following boxes:

So, let’s see how we can use AI to help us with these tasks.

Dibakar Ghosh LinkedIn Profile Pic Unoptimized

Step 1: Make Your Profile Pic More Professional

LinkedIn is aprofessionalsocial media network, so you need to upload a professional-looking profile picture to get the best results, i.e., a response from potential employers. Here are the best practices for nailing your LinkedIn profile pic:

For reference, this was my profile picture at the time of writing:

Removing Background from LinkedIn Profile Pic

While I wouldn’t call itthe worst, the fact that a person is sitting in the background does make it feel a bit casual and unprofessional. Unfortunately, I really don’t have any selfies in my gallery that meet all the mentioned criteria. And since I’m just too lazy to suit up, go outside, and click a good picture, let’s just use AI to fix this issue.

First, I’ll head over to this website:remove.bg. It’s an AI tool where you can upload your picture, and it’ll remove the background from it. The tool also allows you to Add a Background like scenery or just a solid color. I used it to add a white background to the image.

Upscaling LinkedIn Profile Pic

Once done, hit the Download button to download the image to your local storage.

The image we got is 293 x 293 px. This is not a fault of the background removal process. The original image I was using was heavily cropped-in and low res.

Dibakar Ghosh LinkedIn Profile Pic after AI Optimization

Next, I’ll head over to this website:upscale.media. This is an optional step that is only recommended if you’re dealing with a low res image—like mine—that you wish to upscale. Simply click Upload Image and select the image that you want to upscale. You’ll get 2 images, one with normal upscaling and the other with AI upscaling (with the option to Upscale to 2x or 4x size and “Enhance Quality”). Pick the one you like (I picked the AI Upscaled Image) and click “Download Image.”

Now, just upload this image to your LinkedIn profile pic, and you’re one step closer to looking more professional.

Dibakar Ghosh LinkedIn Headline and About Section Unoptimized

It is still recommended that you use a professional headshot and post it on LinkedIn, especially before you start job hunting and networking. But in the meantime, an AI-optimized image can be a decent placeholder.

Step 2: Write a Compelling “Headline” and “About” Section

The Headline is the brief line of text (extendable up to two lines) that appears directly below your name. Whereas the About section is a dedicated text block where you can talk more about yourself and give a broad overview of your professional life.

Both sections are there to help yousell yourselfto potential clients. But as you can see, my lackluster self-description isn’t doing me any favors. So, let’s use AI to fix this.

Dibakar Ghosh Optimized LinkedIn Headline and About Section

I tried this freeLinkedIn Headline Generator from Tapliobut found the output could have been better. I imagine the problem was with the limited data I gave it to work with. But then again, I truly couldn’t figure out what extra info to add. So I decided to useChatGPT(the free version running GPT3.5 will do) and entered this prompt:

As instructed in the prompt, ChatGPT proceeded to ask me a few questions and, based on my responses, came up with this Headline:

Dibakar Ghosh ChatGPT generated LinkedIn Work Experience Descriptions

This is way better than the previous headline! Of course, you are free to edit this and also prompt ChatGPT to generate a few more alternative headlines if you don’t like the first one.

Coming to the About section,Taplio’s LinkedIn Summary Generatorwas pretty good. I particularly found it does a better job with aHumoroustone.

Dibakar Ghosh LinkedIn Profile Background Image using Canva

The output could have benefited from a little more context, so I plugged this into ChatGPT again and added the following prompt:

And with that, this is my new AI-generated LinkedIn About section:

Claude Suggested LinkedIn Profile Background Image Ideas

All that remains now is to plug both the Headline and About sections into LinkedIn.

Step 3: Write Descriptions for “Work Experience” and “Education”

For the Work Experience and Education sections, you should provide as much detail as possible so that people who land on your LinkedIn profile can get a clear picture of your professional and academic background. There isn’t a particular AI tool that can help you at this stage. You basically need to sit and journal about all the places you worked at and all the different certificates you hold.

Here’s a really helpful article onWriting Your LinkedIn Experience Section. It contains a lot of actionable tips and tricks that apply to both the Work Experience and Education sections. Now, while populating the sections with relevant data, you will come across a field called “Description,” where you get to go into more detail about your experience in that position to woo any profile visitors. Now, this is an area where AI can come in handy. Just paste the following Prompt into ChatGPT:

The prompt will initiate ChatGPT to ask you a series of questions. Answer all of them, and you’ll get a tailored description of each of your jobs and academic roles. Here’s my LinkedIn profile’s Work Experience section after updating it with the ChatGPT-generated descriptions.

Following the same idea, you may also update the Education section.

The quality of generated descriptions will improve with the paid version of ChatGPT. However, for the sake of this tutorial, I did use the free version and made some minor edits to the output in terms of grammar and phrasing.

Step 4: Design a Custom Profile Background Image

You might’ve heard, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” and we are trying to exemplify that with the LinkedIn Profile Background Image. The idea is to include a photo or image that encapsulates and complements your LinkedIn profile, so profile visitors can quickly get an idea of who you are as a professional. You can check out thisUltimate Guide to Crafting the Perfect LinkedIn Cover Imagefor ideas and inspiration on how to make this image.

Now,Canvais arguably the most popular tool for creating these Profile Background Images. It has tons of useful templates that you may edit and optimize to build these images.

However, since these are premade templates, other people will also be using them. As such, I’ll be using AI to ensure we are using something personalized and representative of our unique professional background.

First, let’s jump on over toClaude(the free version will suffice) and enter the following prompt:

You can also use this prompt with ChatGPT. But I personally findClaude’s output better for creativity-oriented workloads.

Here’s a look at some of the results I got:

Now remember that you may prompt Claude to generate 10 more ideas if you don’t like the ones you got first. Also, you can mix and match elements you like from each of these ideas to form your own prompt. I particularly like this idea:

After picking an idea to use as your prompt, head on over to thetext-to-image modelof your preference. I’ll be usingOpenArt(free trial) for this showcase. And here’s how the image turned out:

Once you have the image ready, go toCanva> click on the “Create A Design” button > search for “LinkedIn Background Photo,“and select it.

Now, inside the Canva editor, you simply drag and drop the photo to upload it, reposition it to fit the aspect ratio, and add any text you like—preferably your name and professional title. And that’s it, your LinkedIn Background Cover Image is ready. Here’s how my LinkedIn profile looked after all the AI tweaks and edits:

Optimizing your LinkedIn profile doesn’t have to be a tedious chore. When you find yourself at a loss for words or ideas, use AI tools to break free from creative blocks and enhance your profile effortlessly.