The LinkedIn Featured Section, Curated to a Pinned Set of Proof

You are a job seeker, and your Featured section is the shelf a recruiter sees before they decide whether to keep reading. This guide is a curation procedure, not a click-walkthrough: it takes you from an inventory of your real work to a published, ordered set of three to six items, each titled and thumbnailed to render cleanly, with a refresh cadence tied to how hard you are searching. Everything here is for a job seeker convincing a hiring audience, not a founder selling a service.

Most positioning advice covers your About section, your resume summary, and recruiter-search keywords. The Featured section is treated as an afterthought, usually a generic "here is how to click Add" post. It is actually a distinct curation job with its own stakes, because it is the one part of your profile where you fully control both the proof and the order in which it appears.

Why the Featured section is worth curating, not just filling

The Featured section is the only place on your profile where you can pin outbound links with no engagement penalty, which is why order matters more than quantity. One practitioner analysis puts it bluntly: it is the only free place for a link, and in their data link posts over-index 1.5x in the bottom half of performance when posted to the feed. Featured cards escape that suppression entirely.

That changes the economics. A pinned post occupies roughly three times the vertical space of the same post scrolled past in the feed, so three pinned items function as three full-size advertisements for you on your own profile. The section launched in February 2020, when LinkedIn replaced the old Media block inside About with Featured as a standalone section. It is prime real estate, and most people waste it. One source claims 80% of users leave Featured completely blank; that figure has no published methodology, so treat it as directional rather than exact, but the underlying pattern is easy to confirm by scrolling your own network.

3x

The job, then, is not to fill the section. It is to decide what to pin, in what order, and what to leave off, so a recruiter sees proof before they scroll.

What you can actually pin, and the formats that render

LinkedIn supports four native Featured types plus newsletters: posts, articles, links to external sites, and uploaded media. Each behaves differently, and two behaviors trip people up often enough to state up front.

First, native posts and articles have a prerequisite. You must have already authored and published a post or article on LinkedIn before you can feature it. External links carry no such requirement; you can add a portfolio URL that has never touched LinkedIn. So if you want a specific post pinned, publish it first, then feature it.

Second, uploaded media and link cards render in different shapes, which determines how you prepare thumbnails. Link and article cards use a wide landscape frame. Directly uploaded images render square. Build the wrong shape and you get a cropped, lopsided card.

Here are the documented specs, by item type.

The document limits are the one place LinkedIn Help is explicit: file size cannot exceed 100 MB, the page limit is 300 pages, and the word count limit is one million words. Supported upload formats include PDF, PowerPoint, Word, JPG, PNG, and GIF, though a GIF shows only its first frame. The link and upload dimensions above are practitioner-derived, because LinkedIn Help does not publish an exact Featured spec.

How many items to pin, and why the number is not a platform rule

Pin three to six items, and treat that as a curation choice rather than a platform cap, because no official cap exists for a job seeker. This is one of the most confused points in every guide you will read, so it is worth getting right.

LinkedIn Help gives no numeric limit on Featured work samples. It only notes that you need at least two featured items before you can reorder them. A separate Premium Business feature, for pinning profile details rather than work samples, states there is no limit on how many details you can add, but that is a different feature. The blog claims you will find contradict each other outright: one says three items on a free account, another says five, a third says up to fifty. None cites LinkedIn documentation.

So the defensible position is this: there is no documented free-account cap, and three to six items perform best for a job seeker. The reason to stop at six is not a rule. It is the mobile carousel.

Adding a seventh item does not add an option; it pushes your strongest proof or your next-step link further from view. If you cannot see it on a phone without swiping, assume a recruiter will not.

What actually gets seen in the Featured carousel

1. Items you could pin

   6

   no documented cap forces this

2. Visible on desktop before an arrow click

   3

   roughly two to three cards

3. Visible on mobile before a swipe

   1.5

   about one and a half cards

4. The slot a recruiter reliably sees

   1

   slot one is the whole game

Slot one is the whole game

Your leftmost item should be your strongest proof for your target role, or your highest-value next step, because visitors rarely scroll and mobile shows only about one and a half cards. Everything else in the section is insurance; slot one is the pitch.

What belongs in slot one depends on the role and the proof you own. A product designer's slot one is usually a portfolio case study link or a custom-thumbnailed project. An engineer's might be a GitHub link where the code is the proof. A career-switcher's might be a short availability post that states the target role in plain words, since a written post you control beats the Open to Work badge: it says what you are looking for in your own words and can be removed silently.

Order the remaining items by descending proof strength, and remember the mobile constraint when you do. Slot-two content can be invisible on a phone. Do not bury something that must be seen behind slot one.

If a recruiter has to swipe to find your best work, assume they never will.