How to Improve LinkedIn Profile Suggestions

Constantly seeing connection suggestions on LinkedIn from your old high school or a random industry you left a decade ago? It feels strange, but the People You May Know feature isn't just making wild guesses. LinkedIn's recommendation engine is an algorithm that works entirely off the signals you provide through your profile and activity. This guide will walk you through exactly how to adjust those signals so LinkedIn starts recommending professionals who can actually help grow your career.

First, Let's Pull Back the Curtain on LinkedIn Suggestions

Before you can fix the problem, it helps to understand what's happening behind the scenes. LinkedIn’s primary goal is to build a relevant professional graph for every user. It doesn't suggest people randomly, it uses a stack of data points to generate educated guesses about who you might know or should know. The biggest factors influencing your suggestions include:

• Your Current Connections: This is the most obvious one. LinkedIn looks at your 1st-degree connections and suggests their connections (your 2nd and 3rd-degree connections). It assumes that people in your extended network are likely relevant.
• Profile Information: The algorithm scours your profile - your headline, summary, job descriptions, industry, and location - for keywords. It uses these to match you with others in similar roles, companies, or fields.
• Work History & Education: Past employers and schools are a goldmine for suggestions. The platform has a strong bias toward connecting you with past colleagues and fellow alumni.
• Imported Contacts: If you've ever synced your email or phone contacts with LinkedIn, that list becomes a permanent source of suggestions, for better or worse.
• Your Activity: What you do on the platform matters. The people you follow, the content you like and comment on, the groups you join, and the profiles you view all serve as powerful indicators of your interests.

Improving your suggestions is all about taking control of these data points. You need to stop passively letting the algorithm guess and start actively telling it what you want it to see.

A Quick Win: Manage Your Synced Contacts

One of the most common reasons for getting irrelevant suggestions is an outdated list of synced contacts. Maybe you synced your Gmail contacts ten years ago, and now LinkedIn keeps suggesting the plumber you hired in 2012 or your cousin's old college roommate. This is often the biggest polluter of your suggestion feed and, luckily, one of the easiest to fix.

By removing old, irrelevant contact lists, you immediately cut off a major source of low-quality recommendations. Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to your LinkedIn homepage and click on the My Network icon in the top navigation bar.
2. On the left-hand sidebar, look for a section called "Contacts" or a similar prompt to manage your network. Sometimes this is found under "More options".
3. Within the contact management area, you should see options to manage and remove your synced contacts from different sources (like Gmail, Outlook, or your phone).
4. Find the sources that are no longer relevant and remove them. This tells LinkedIn to stop using that address book to find potential connections. You can also sometimes remove individual contacts if you don't want to sever the whole source.

Cleaning this out gives you a fresh start and stops the algorithm from pulling from a list that no longer represents your professional life.

Signal Your Intent: Make Your Profile Work for You

Your profile is the single most important tool for guiding the recommendation algorithm. If your profile is a generic summary of your past, you'll get generic suggestions. If it’s optimized for your future and filled with the right keywords, LinkedIn will start showing you the right people. Treat every section as a message to the algorithm.

Your Headline and Summary are Your North Star

The headline and summary are the first things the algorithm - and other people - read. Don't just list your job title. Use this space to describe who you are, what you do, and who you want to connect with. Use keywords for your industry, your specialty, and the areas you're most interested in.

Generic Headline: "Manager at Acme Corp"

Optimized Headline: "Product Marketing Manager at Acme Corp | B2B SaaS Launch Strategy | Go-to-Market for FinTech"

The second headline isn't just more descriptive for humans, it gives LinkedIn clear keywords like "Product Marketing," "B2B SaaS," "Launch Strategy," and "FinTech." The algorithm will immediately start looking for other professionals with these terms on their profiles.

Your Experience Section Needs Keywords, Not Just Titles

Beneath each role in your Experience section, your description should be more than just a list of duties. Weave in the keywords that define your work. Think about the tools you use, the methodologies you follow, and the specific niche you operate in.

If you're a software developer, mention the specific programming languages (Python, JavaScript) and frameworks (React, Django) you use. If you're in logistics, use terms like "supply chain optimization," "freight forwarding," or "last-mile delivery." These details help LinkedIn place you in a professional ecosystem and suggest others within it.

Skills & Endorsements: Vote for the Connections You Want

The Skills section is a direct signal to LinkedIn about your core competencies. Yet most people let it become a junk drawer of old, irrelevant skills endorsed by people they barely know. Take five minutes to tidy it up:

• Prune the List: Remove skills that are no longer relevant to your career. You probably don't need "Microsoft Word" clogging up the list.
• Add Niche Skills: Add skills that are specific to your target role or industry. Don't just write "Marketing", add "Content Strategy," "SEO," "HubSpot," or "PPC Campaigns."
• Pin Your Top 3: The three skills you "pin" to the top of your list carry the most weight. Make sure they represent the core of a person you want to become, not just the job you have now.

By curating your skills, you're helping the algorithm find others who have been endorsed for, or are seeking, those same abilities.

You Are What You Do: Guide LinkedIn with Your Activity

What you do on LinkedIn from day to day sends constant feedback to the recommendation engine. You can use your activity to actively shape your suggestions.

Join and Participate in Niche Groups

Joining groups is one of the most powerful and underutilized methods for refining your connection suggestions. Finding a group for "Women in Product Management" or "Renewable Energy Professionals" instantly tells LinkedIn what you're interested in. Members of these groups will begin appearing in your "People You May Know" feed because you've demonstrated a clear, shared interest.

Follow Industry Leaders and Companies You Admire

Who you follow tells a story. Go follow 10-20 thought leaders in your field and 5-10 companies you one day aspire to work for. LinkedIn's algorithm registers these follows as a strong signal of intent. It will start suggesting other employees at those companies and other people who follow the same thought leaders.

Be Intentional About Who You Look At

The algorithm pays attention to which profiles you visit. If you want to connect with more directors of marketing in the tech industry, find a few of them and visit their profiles. This simple act can prime the pump. LinkedIn’s collaborative filtering system works on the principle that "people who looked at X also looked at Y." You're giving it the "X" so it can start suggesting the "Y."

Similarly, be selective about the connection requests you accept. Accepting every single request, especially from a wildly different industry, confuses the algorithm. A focused network generates focused suggestions.

The "Ignore" Button Is Your Best Friend

Finally, every list of suggestions on LinkedIn comes with a little "x" or an "Ignore" button next to each name. Use it. This is direct negative feedback. You're explicitly telling the algorithm, "No, this is not a relevant connection for me." While ignoring one bad suggestion won't change much, being diligent about it for a week or two can have a noticeable impact. If you ruthlessly ignore every irrelevant suggestion you see, the algorithm will eventually learn what you don't want and stop serving up those types of profiles. It's like down-voting a movie on a streaming service, over time, the platform gets the message and refines its recommendations.

Final Thoughts

Improving your LinkedIn suggestions isn't about finding a secret hack, it's about being a clear communicator. By cleaning up your contact list, optimizing the language on your profile, and being intentional with your activity, you are actively guiding the platform's algorithm to show you people who can help you reach your professional goals.

Speaking of a powerful presence, a well-managed network becomes even more valuable when you consistently share relevant content that signals your expertise. Keeping your profile active helps the algorithm understand your professional focus in real-time. We built Postbase to make that part effortless, especially for modern content like video that performs so well. Our visual planner and reliable scheduling mean you can map out your LinkedIn content with confidence, knowing it will get published exactly when you plan it.