LinkedIn already gives you a QR code, tucked behind the search bar in the app. It works, but only for someone who also has LinkedIn open on their phone at the right screen. This one is a plain image with your profile’s URL inside it and your photo dithered through the pattern — any camera reads it, and it’s actually worth a second look.
How to do it
Start with your public profile URL
Your profile lives at linkedin.com/in/your-slug. Paste the whole URL or just the slug — either way the builder pulls out the part that matters. If LinkedIn gave you a long, number-heavy slug, it's worth five minutes in Settings → Edit public profile & URL first: a shorter slug is fewer characters for the code to carry, which leaves larger, more forgiving modules for the photo.
Use the photo you'd actually hand a recruiter
A proper headshot works better here than it does almost anywhere else on this site — the strong, deliberate lighting most professional photography already uses is exactly what error diffusion needs to separate a face from what's behind it. Flat, shadowless office lighting is the one style that gives a dither the least to hold onto, headshot or not.
Crop tighter than a profile photo needs
LinkedIn's own circle crop leaves air around the shoulders; this doesn't have that luxury. Zoom until the face fills most of the frame before you dither — a crop that reads fine at profile-photo size can lose the features entirely once it's reduced to one bit per pixel.
Start with Floyd–Steinberg, not Atkinson
A collar, a lapel, hair with actual structure — a business headshot usually carries more mid-tone detail than a tight, evenly-lit selfie, and Floyd–Steinberg's four-way diffusion holds onto that better than Atkinson's punchier, lossier default. Switch to Atkinson only if the result still reads as muddy rather than sharp.
Check the scan, then export for where it's going
Test it with your own phone before you commit to it — nothing here decodes the code for you first. A code bound for a screen — an email signature, a slide — can run smaller than one bound for print, where a badge or a business card wants a clean quiet zone and a size no smaller than about 2cm square.
LinkedIn’s own QR code isn’t the same thing
Point a plain camera at LinkedIn’s in-app profile code and it typically won’t resolve — it’s built to be read by LinkedIn’s own scanner, so the person on the other end needs the app open too. A code that just encodes your profile URL has no such requirement: it’s a normal QR code, so any camera app or reader gets someone to your profile, LinkedIn installed or not.
Where it actually earns its place
An email signature, the closing slide of a talk, a printed business card, a conference badge or lanyard, the header of a CV — any spot where LinkedIn’s own in-app code can’t reach because nobody there has the app open. Because the picture is spread across the whole code rather than sitting in a logo box, it also reads as you before anyone has actually scanned it, which a generic square never does. For the printed cases, see putting a code on a business card for sizing and paper stock; for a code that saves your details straight to a phone instead of opening a profile, see the vCard guide.