Quick one before we start: if you're not following me on LinkedIn yet, do. It won't necessarily put you on a recruiter's radar (that's not what following does). What it means is that you see what I, as a TA Director, am actually seeing from inside 'hiring' and Recruiters' points of view right now, while it's fresh and useful to you.
OK so you've built your CV and profile, you're applying constantly, and you still feel invisible. Like Recruiters are searching right past you.
Here's the worry I hear from job applicants: you don't actually know what a recruiter's search is looking for, or worse, what if some of the roles you're applying to were never real jobs at all?
Both of those things are unfortunately more common than most job seekers realise. But both are fixable once you understand the mechanics...
Recruiters aren't only searching for job titles
Recruiters increasingly search in skill clusters, not single keywords. That means describing a role in plain English and letting AI, whether through a recruiter's Applicant Tracking System (ATS)* or LinkedIn itself, convert that into a filtered candidate list. Search work that used to take 15 minutes now takes about 30 seconds.
That changes what actually gets you found.
A profile listing "paid media, programmatic, DSPs, campaign optimisation" together surfaces far better than any one of those terms alone, because that's the cluster a recruiter is actually describing when they search. A single buzzword in your headline isn't enough anymore, the combination is what the system is matching on.
It's also worth knowing that serious employer enterprise sourcing tools pull from more than your LinkedIn profile. If you have public work sitting elsewhere, published articles, conference appearances and attendances, a portfolio, those can genuinely feed into how you get surfaced in a search too.
Verified skills beat claimed skills
Anyone can list "expert in paid media" on their profile. Recruiters know that, which is why "LinkedIn Skill Assessments" and badges matter more than most job seekers realise.
Pass one, scoring in the top 30% against a benchmark, and you get a verified badge next to that skill. Recruiters can filter LinkedIn Recruiter searches to show only badge holders, so a badge-holder appears in a search that a non-badge-holder simply doesn't. There are limits, of course: a badge opens the door, it doesn't win the room, and it can't rescue a weak profile, it just makes a strong one easier to find first.
LinkedIn has also started rolling out "Connected Apps," where authorising a tool you genuinely use generates a short description of your real activity in it, not something you write yourself. That gives your LinkedIn profile additional credibility, because it can't be inflated the way a self-written claim can. Right now the supported apps skew heavily technical, so it won't apply to everyone in AdTech yet, but the direction is worth understanding: verified, provable signals are starting to matter more than self-written claims across the LinkedIn platform generally.
The next "fun" bit to know: not every job you're applying to may be real :-(
This is really worth knowing. There's a lot of talk between experts and recruiters on LinkedIn right now about "ghost" jobs. Postings with no real, active hiring behind them.
Some well-known gaps:
One analysis of LinkedIn listings specifically estimated roughly 27% of US ads may be ghost jobs, and a March 2026 survey found 47% of job seekers had applied to a role that turned out never to have existed at all. (The 27% figure comes from a single third-party analysis, not LinkedIn's own data).
In the UK, recent data found 24% of workers have applied for a role that turned out to be a ghost job.
Solid EU-wide figures are harder to find. I guess comprehensive research genuinely hasn't yet caught up with the scale of it across Europe, but from what I am seeing, recruiters and hiring platforms in European markets are reporting the same pattern.
So wherever you're applying, don't be too discouraged: some real share of the roles you see were never actively going to be filled.
Why does this happen? Companies and recruiters post roles for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with an active open role - building a talent pipeline for later, appearing to be growing, or simply forgetting to take a filled role down. None of it is something you did wrong, but it's a real reason your applications can go nowhere even when your CV is strong.
This is genuinely one real reason to apply through a credible, curated job board rather than only self-serve job listings. As an example, Jobs in AdTech, which hosts this blog, is the official jobs partner of the IAB Tech Lab, a recognised standards body in this industry, and a platform where employers pay specifically to post real, current roles. Yes, I'm aware of how this might sound.. recruitment leader writes blog post and recommends the job board hosting her blog post... But the incentive logic is relevant and real, regardless of who's pointing it out or which job board you use.
Where AI is genuinely helping
It's worth being fair to AI too. Recruiters are reporting that AI is helping them find "hidden gem" candidates. Finding talent that a manual or boolean search may have overlooked. They are also commenting (a lot!) about how important Recruiters are in the process - they add human validation to an AI search.
3 things I'd tell you from the hiring side
- Build your headline and summary around a skill cluster, not a job title. List the specific combination of tools and skills that actually define your role together, in the language a recruiter would plausibly type into a search, not just your title. That's what modern search is actually matching on.
- Take 2-3 genuinely relevant LinkedIn Skill Assessments and display the badges. This is one of the few concrete things you can do that puts you inside a filtered search a non-badge-holder never appears in. It makes you easier to find.
- Apply through credible, curated platforms alongside LinkedIn, not instead of it. It's not just about a credible source giving your application more context when a recruiter opens it, it also meaningfully lowers your odds of pouring effort into a role that was never real in the first place.
Where that leaves you
None of this means the effort you've already put in was wasted. It just means some of it was aimed at a search algorithm and a job listing landscape you may not have known about. Now you can see how some of the matching actually works, and how to tell a real opportunity from a stale one, you're not just applying harder, you're applying smarter.
If you'd like a second, experienced pair of eyes on whether your profile and CV are actually built to be found this way, that's exactly what I help with. Contact me on my LinkedIn Services page.
In my next blog, I'll tackle the worry almost everyone searching right now is thinking: is AI silently screening out your CV before a human ever sees it? Follow along so you don't miss it!
* An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is the software most employers use to collect, sort and search job applications, the database sitting behind almost every "Apply Now" button, not a judge of your CV itself.
The views and advice in this post are my own, drawn from my own experience in talent acquisition. Jobs in AdTech hosts this content but hasn't reviewed, confirmed or approved the specific claims or advice in it, and it doesn't represent an official Jobs in AdTech position.