You run the finance team at a logistics firm from Monday to Friday. On Sundays you keep the books for three restaurants, and since spring you have sat on the board of a housing charity. All three are true, all three are happening now, and LinkedIn lets you list every one of them as a current position. Whether you should, and in what order, is a different question.
The profile assumes one person, one job. Give it several and it still has to choose one for the places with room for only one, so the work is steering that choice.
What the profile picks up when two roles are current
Three places matter, and they do not all behave alike.
The headline is the line under your name. By default it usually follows a current position unless you write your own, and with several current positions you cannot count on it following the one you would have picked. Write it yourself. A hand-written headline stays put when you add a role, which is the whole point.
The top of the profile generally shows one employer next to your name, sometimes with its logo. You can generally choose which employer appears there and the order of concurrent positions, though the wording of those settings changes and can differ between the app and the website. Check after every edit, because a newly added current position has a way of promoting itself.
Then there is what a recruiter sees in search results: a compact card with your name, headline, location and typically one current role. Nobody outside LinkedIn can tell you with certainty how those results are ranked, so I will not pretend to. What you can observe is that the card is small, and a recruiter decides from it whether to open the profile. If it says "Founder, Sunday Ledger" and the recruiter was looking for a finance manager, you may never get the click.
Whatever sits first among your current positions is what most readers take to be your job. Everything else is read as context.
Choose the role that leads, then order the rest
Start from the reader you care about most this year. If you want your next salaried role, the main job leads and the side work sits under it. If the side business is the thing you are building toward, it can lead, but accept that recruiters for employed roles will read you as half out of the door.
A test I find useful: read only your name, headline and first position, then ask what a stranger would say you do for a living. If the answer is not the one you want, the order is wrong.
Some practical points on the entries themselves:
- Name the scale honestly. "Bookkeeping for three independent restaurants, around five hours a week" is more reassuring than a grand title with no description. Vague entries invite the worst reading.
- Use the employment type field if it is offered. Marking a role as freelance, self-employed or part-time does a lot of the explaining for you.
- Keep the headline about one thing. Two roles joined by a separator read as indecision. The second one belongs in the About section.
The CV is a separate document with its own rules, and our article "Second Job on a CV: How to List Work Alongside Your Main Role" covers that side. One thing connects the two, though. If you build your CV from your profile with a LinkedIn-to-CV tool such as Postulit, what sits in the current positions is what lands at the top of the generated CV, in the same order. Fix the order once on the profile and the document inherits it.
What your employer infers, and what a recruiter infers
The same line gets read in two opposite ways.
Your manager, or someone in HR, sees a visible side activity and asks three quiet questions. Is this done on our time? Does it compete with us or draw on our clients? Is this person preparing to leave? A side business in an unrelated field, with a stated small scope, answers all three. A consultancy in your employer's own sector, placed first in the headline, answers none of them.
A recruiter asks different things. Would this person be fully available? Would the side work stop if they joined us, and would they want it to? Is the main job solid, or is it the one that is fading? A short description that states hours and scope removes most of that doubt.
Before you make anything visible, read your contract and any outside-activities or conflict-of-interest policy your employer has, because some require disclosure or approval and the rules vary by country and by contract; this is a caution from a careers blog, not legal advice.
Sequence matters too. If your employer is going to learn about the side work, better they hear it from you than from a notification. Profiles often announce new positions to your network unless you have switched that sharing off, and your colleagues are in your network.
A board or volunteer seat is not a side business
A board seat, trustee role or unpaid advisory position is usually read as a credit. It suggests that a group of people trusted your judgment, and it rarely raises the question of divided time. Many profiles place unpaid roles in a dedicated volunteering section, which keeps them visible without competing for the top slot. A paid non-executive directorship is closer to work and can reasonably sit among your positions, below the main job.
A paid side business or freelance practice is commercial. It has clients, invoices and possibly competitors in common with your employer.
The mistake I notice most is the inflated advisory title. Being "Advisor" to a friend's startup after two phone calls is not a position. If you would struggle to say what you did there last quarter, leave it out.
When to leave it off
Listing a current side role is optional. Nobody audits a profile for completeness. Leave it off when:
- It has nothing to do with the work you want next, or with how you want to be found. A weekend market stall does not need a LinkedIn entry.
- Your employer has not been told, or has said no.
- It is so small or so new that it would look bigger on the profile than it is in life.
Keeping it on makes sense when the side activity finds clients through LinkedIn, when it shows a skill your main job hides, or when it is where your career is heading. The question to ask is narrow: does this current line help the reader you care about?
Leaving something off does not make it secret, since company registers and client websites exist. Decide on relevance, not on the hope that nobody finds out.
Close a side role cleanly
Side activities end quietly. The last client leaves, the board term runs out, and the entry stays "present" for another two years. A stale current role does more harm than an old one: it keeps pulling at your headline and your top card, and it makes a careful reader wonder what else is out of date.
When it ends, give it an end date that month. Keep the description, change the tense, and state the result in a line if there was one. Then look at the headline and the top of the profile again, because closing one position can shift which of the others is shown first. If the activity is only paused, an end date is still the honest choice.
So, tonight: open your profile in a private browser window, the way a stranger sees it. Read the name, the headline and the first position. If those three lines describe the job you want people to associate with you, you are done. If they describe your Sunday bookkeeping, reorder the positions, rewrite the headline by hand, and put dates on anything that has already ended.