Saving your profile as a pdf
Like we said before, your LinkedIn profile can work as a regular resume – but only if you use a little trick that the site is capable of: exporting the info as a PDF file. To do so, all you need is to go to your profile, click on the three dots next to your profile picture (beside the editing symbol), and hit Save as PDF. LinkedIn will then create a shortened PDF version of the details on your profile; you’ll have a file with your name, current title and email address in the header followed by your professional summary, experience and education.
Unfortunately, though, the exported version of your profile is very lackluster: it doesn’t sport your profile picture, your skills and accomplishments and it adds a link to your LinkedIn profile to the end of the “resume”, making this whole exportation ordeal almost pointless.
Building a resume out of linkedin
Though the features have since been removed, LinkedIn used to provide an online resume builder and the option to use a regular CV as the basis of your profile. However, since none of the above services are available anymore, you will have to resort to third-party resume builders that allow the importing of existing documents. Thankfully, there are plenty of companies that support LinkedIn import – but not in the way you would expect.
The problem is that you have to differentiate between those builders that support direct LinkedIn import and those which prefer PDF upload – and sadly the latter is the one you will encounter the most. Resumonk, LiveCareer and My Perfect Resume cannot directly retrieve the necessary information from your LinkedIn profile and require you to upload everything in PDF format. Resumonk is the worst in this case because it cheats; it advertises itself as being capable of importing your LinkedIn profile, but in fact all it does is direct you to a link explaining how to export your data to PDF. Unfortunately the same goes for VisualCV, a builder we once praised for offering LinkedIn import: as the company states, your only option now is to export the butchered version of your profile.
Therefore, if you want a resume builder that can import the necessary data using LinkedIn, your only chance (until it’s revoked) is via Résunate. Just remember that the information you import from LinkedIn will be mixed with those you entered into all previous CVs created with Résunate. However, if you start with a clean slate, you just have to provide your email address and password to LinkedIn and the necessary data will be imported in no time.
Zoltán G.
Sander D.
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