Founder Titles Rose 70% on LinkedIn. Your Current-Title Filter Misfires

If your Boolean strings or Hiring Assistant searches rely on "current title" and "current company," they now tag Staff engineers as founders and miss them when you search for engineers. LinkedIn now lets members list several current jobs at once, and it reports a 70% rise over the last year in members adding "founder" to their profiles. More exclusions won't fix that. Treat the side project as a signal and check it against GitHub and other public evidence.

What did LinkedIn change?

LinkedIn is changing profiles so members can highlight multiple current jobs, and it is adding creator-focused tools for founders. It is also rolling out Advice Sessions, which give members a money reason to list a second "current" role, usually titled founder, co-founder or consultant.

The pieces that matter for sourcing:

• Multiple concurrent jobs. According to Engadget, LinkedIn is changing profiles so people can highlight more than one job, and it's adding creator-focused tools for founders.
• Advice Sessions. These paid sessions are initially available to US members on a Business Premium subscription, and LinkedIn takes no cut. That gives people a direct financial reason to list a consulting or founder role.
• The founder surge. LinkedIn reports a 70% increase over the last year in people who have added "founder" to their profiles.
• The baseline. Fortune reports that the share of members with more than one ongoing position has risen 26% since 2019. CEO Daniel Shapero has framed the side-hustle trend around "workfluencers."

70%

Why does the current-title filter break when people list multiple current jobs?

LinkedIn's Title field only searches current positions. Once a member has two current positions, both of them match.

A current-title filter is a search constraint that matches a keyword only against the roles a member marks as ongoing. It used to be a fair stand-in for "what this person does all day." Now a Staff engineer at a large employer who also lists "Founder, [weekend app]" as current matches both title:"staff engineer" and title:founder.

That creates three distinct failures:

1. False positives on founder searches. If you're looking for real founders, for a VC portfolio list or a founding-team hire, a Title search for "founder" now returns Principal engineers who never left their employer.
2. False negatives from exclusions. Many recruiters add NOT founder to engineering strings to drop people who are unlikely to move. That exclusion now removes working Staff engineers whose only "company" is a side project.
3. Fuzzy current-company logic. A member with two current employers matches a search on either one. Company-based targeting and exclusion lists, such as "skip current clients," now hit people through roles that don't reflect where they spend their week.

Boolean strings, filters and agent searches all start from the same "current" fields, so all three inherit these problems.

What does Refolk's index show about engineers with founder titles?

In Refolk's index of professional profiles, 5,138 US profiles match a Founder or Co-Founder title plus the keyword "software engineer." In a 25-profile sample of that set, only 9 show founder as their top current title. Eight lead with an engineering title instead: Principal, Staff, Senior, SDE II or Founding Engineer.

The pattern gets sharper as seniority rises. 948 US Senior, Staff and Principal Software Engineers have "founder" in their headline. In a 25-profile sample of that group, 21 list an individual-contributor engineering title as their top current title. Their employers include Workday, HubSpot, DraftKings and Piper Sandler. The broader founder-plus-engineer sample includes people at Expedia Group and Algorand.

These are small directional samples, not population rates. Even so, the direction is clear. In the US, about one in three people who match "founder" have an engineering job as their main title. Among senior engineers who put "founder" in their headline, 84% of the sample still list an IC engineering role first.

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Why is "founder" growing faster than founding?

The label is free to add and now has a way to earn money, while actually holding a second job takes real effort. "Founder" rose 70% in one year. Members with more than one ongoing position rose 26% over roughly seven years. The label is spreading much faster than the behaviour behind it.

The mechanism is simple. Adding "Founder" to a profile costs nothing and makes someone look entrepreneurial. With Advice Sessions, a founder or consultant role also works as a storefront for paid calls. Neither incentive requires a company with customers, code or co-workers.

So in any founder-title sourcing workflow, treat "founder" as a claim to verify, not a fact. Some of these people run real companies. Some have a domain and an idea. A real share are senior engineers with a serious side project, and for most recruiters that last group is the most valuable.

How do you tell a real founder from a moonlighting engineer?

Look at the top current title, the overlapping dates and whether anyone else works at the side company. Then look for public evidence of the work. A missing GitHub history doesn't disqualify anyone.

Run these checks in order:

1. Top current title. If an engineering role at an established employer appears first, the person is most likely a moonlighter.
2. Date overlap. A founder role that started while the day job continued, with no end date on either, points to a side project.
3. Company type. LinkedIn's company-type filter includes self-owned and self-employed types. A "company" in those categories is usually one person.
4. Headcount. If nobody else lists the side company as a current employer, it's a solo project.
5. Commit timing. If a side-project GitHub org shows commits clustered on evenings and weekends, the person is building around a day job.
6. Open-web traces. A live domain or a launch post shows the project ships, which is a different thing from a project that only exists as a title.

Don't read GitHub silence as fraud

GitHub data has a blind spot. Public repositories make up 63% of projects on GitHub, yet 81.5% of contributions happen in private repos. A real founder building a commercial product will often show nothing public at all. Use public commits to confirm a profile. Don't use their absence to reject one.

Doing all six checks by hand on every profile is where a sourcing day disappears. With Refolk, you describe the person you want in plain English, such as a senior engineer at a large company with a side project that has a public GitHub org, and get back a shortlist with the LinkedIn roles and the public evidence side by side.

How do you source engineers with side projects?

Search for the overlap on purpose: a senior IC title at an established employer plus a founder or side-project role. Then open your message with the side project itself. The "noise" the filter now adds is the very trait you want.

The moonlighter is the best passive lead in the whole set, for three reasons:

• They're employed. They have a day job, a salary and a current employer you can name, which makes them passive candidates in the classic sense.
• They show initiative. They build things nobody asked them to build, on their own time.
• They leave evidence. Side projects tend to have a domain, a GitHub org or a launch post, and that gives you a specific, honest reason to reach out.

Markus Persson is the standard example. He developed his game in his free time while employed as a programmer, before he founded Mojang. Most moonlighters won't become Persson. But the trait that made his side project work (shipping without being told to) is exactly what hiring managers mean by "high ownership."

A workflow that holds up:

1. Flip the exclusion. Replace NOT founder with a separate search: engineering title AND founder. Review that list rather than discarding it.
2. Split by top title. Put people whose first title is engineering in one bucket and people whose first title is founder in another. They need different pitches.
3. Verify the project. Use the checks above. Keep anyone whose project shows public evidence that it ships.
4. Write to the project. Mention the thing they built: the repo, the launch post, the specific technical choice. Don't open with their employer.
5. Pitch the overlap. If the side project suggests the day job doesn't stretch them, a role with more scope, or one that tolerates the side project, is the honest hook.

Will Hiring Assistant 2 learn to hide moonlighters?

It can, if your team keeps passing on them. Hiring Assistant 2 remembers who you invited and who you passed on, and it uses that history to shape what it suggests next. A team habit of skipping anyone with a founder role becomes the agent's default.

LinkedIn announced Hiring Assistant 2 on Sept 29. Existing English-language customers get the update automatically, at no extra cost, starting in November 2026. LinkedIn says more than 20,000 companies already use its agentic hiring solutions, so a learned bias spreads across a lot of seats. Dan Reid, LinkedIn's VP of Product, summed up the design goal as "Do what I meant, not what I said." The risk is that what you meant before multi-role profiles existed was "skip founders."

If your team keeps passing on founder roles, Hiring Assistant 2 will learn to stop showing you moonlighters.

A third-party review from HeroHunt says LinkedIn's release notes confirm the agent now pulls candidate signals from GitHub and other external platforms. Treat that as unconfirmed until LinkedIn's own documentation says so. Open-web tools such as hireEZ and SeekOut pitch themselves on reaching GitHub-native talent that LinkedIn's agent misses. That is vendor positioning, not proof, but it tells you where the gap is assumed to be.

To keep the agent's memory clean:

• Don't bulk-pass on founder profiles in November. Every pass is a training signal.
• Invite a few verified moonlighters early, so the agent learns that "engineer with a side company" is a fit.
• Run real-founder searches separately, so the two populations don't blur together.

Should you run US and UK founder searches separately?

Yes, at least for now. In Refolk's index, UK founder-plus-engineer matches were more often real founders: 15 of 25 in the sample had founder as their top title, compared with 9 of 25 in the US.

The US pool is also 5.1 times larger (5,138 profiles against 1,011), so a single global query will be dominated by US moonlighters and treat UK founders as edge cases. The UK count also includes combined titles like "Co-founder and Senior Software Engineer," so some of those 15 are moonlighters too. With samples of 25, this is directional. Run the regions separately and compare what comes back before you assume one string works for both.

FAQ

Does LinkedIn Recruiter's current title filter still work with multiple current jobs?

It works as designed, but the design now matches more than you intend. The Title field searches current positions, and members can now hold several, so a title search matches side roles as well as day jobs. Check the top current title on each result before trusting the filter. In Refolk's US sample, about one in three "founder" matches had an engineering job as their main title.

Should I exclude "founder" from engineering searches?

No. A NOT founder clause now removes working senior engineers who list a side project. In Refolk's index, 948 US Senior, Staff and Principal engineers have "founder" in their headline, and 21 of 25 sampled still list an IC engineering role first. Run them as a separate search and review them.

Is no GitHub activity a red flag for a self-described founder?

Not by itself. 81.5% of GitHub contributions happen in private repositories, so many real products leave no public trail. Look instead at headcount at the side company, date overlap with a day job and open-web evidence that the product exists.