I love LinkedIn. It’s the perfect networking tool for generating new business, job opportunities and keeping in touch with business contacts. The other reason I love it is because it’s my online resume, that anyone can find, read and gain confidence in my capabilities. So why not use LinkedIn to help create your offline resume?
If you have a profile on LinkedIn, take a look at it now. If you don’t, take a look at mine. You’ll notice that a LinkedIn profile is structured to show:
- Your title and current position
- A brief synopsis of you, including current and past positions, education and contact details
- Your summary, possibly including specialities
- Current and previous positions
- Publications
- Skills/expertise
- Languages
- Education
- Recommendations
- Interests
- Group memberships and industry affiliations
- Honors and awards
- Personal information
Isn’t most of this what we put on our resumes?
Why Alignment of a Resume and LinkedIn Profile is Important
I advocate having close alignment of my resume and my LinkedIn profile, because both become more credible. The fact is, most recruiters will sneak a look at your LinkedIn profile, if you have one, to check you out. And people are more truthful about what they write on LinkedIn about themselves. A study by researchers at Cornell University suggests LinkedIn members are less likely to lie about their skills, experience and education on the site than on their resumes. Because LinkedIn is in the public domain, ex-coworkers, managers, subordinates and customers can dispute false claims. Liars are more likely to be caught in the act!
So I recommend that the content of your LinkedIn profile should be used, as-is, as much as possible. A cut-and-paste will do, for most of it.
The structure of the LinkedIn profile is just right too – it’s ordered so that the most relevant and interesting sections are at the top, so when you use this structure on your resume, you’re putting the most important content first.
The ‘recommendations’ section, though, isn’t always the right thing to port over. Depending on your industry, you will probably need to leave that bit on the LinkedIn site. I didn’t use it.
How to Copy a LinkedIn Profile
It’s quite simple. What I did was this:
- I selected the text of my profile on the LinkedIn site by clicking my mouse at the top and dragging it down the bottom
- Then, I hit CTRL+C – or use whatever you prefer to copy to the clipboard
- Next, I opened up Notepad (on my PC, or use TextEdit on the Mac)
- Then I hit CTRL+V – or use your preferred ‘paste’ command
- Next I hit CTRL+A – or whatever you prefer for ‘select all’
- Then I hit CTRL+C – to copy everything into the clipboard again. The reason for using a text editor, for now, is because I want to remove all the formatting and images from the content of my clipboard. You might now of a smarter way of doing this, but it’s a matter of a few speedy clicks and it’s done this way!
- Then I opened up Word – use whichever word processor works for you
- Next I hit CTRL+V to copy the text-only, unformatted content from my clipboard.
My LinkedIn profile, with choice editing, is usable and perfect for my resume.
