Turn Your LinkedIn Profile Into a Resume That Works
LinkedIn will export your profile as a PDF in about four clicks, and that file is a reasonable starting point but not a resume. It carries LinkedIn's section order, a summary written for browsing, and no tailoring to any particular job. Treat the export as raw material and expect to rewrite roughly half of it.
How to export the PDF
The option lives on your own profile, not in settings.
- Open your profile — click your photo in the top navigation, then View Profile.
- Find the More button in your profile header, next to Open to and Add profile section.
- Choose Save to PDF.
- The file downloads after a few seconds, named after your profile.
On the mobile app the same option sits behind the three-dot menu on your profile, though the desktop version is easier to work with immediately afterwards. LinkedIn moves interface elements around periodically; if Save to PDF is not under More, it will be in the same profile header area under a similar label.
Export someone else's profile too
The same option appears on other people's profiles, which is genuinely useful before an interview — you get their full history in one page rather than scrolling. It does not notify them, but it is still their professional history, so treat it accordingly.
What the export actually produces
The PDF is a linear printout of your profile in LinkedIn's own order: name and headline, then About, then Experience, Education, Licences, Skills, and whatever else you have filled in. It is real text rather than an image, so it copies and parses correctly, and it uses LinkedIn's typography rather than anything you chose.
What it is missing is everything that makes a document a resume rather than a profile:
| The export gives you | A resume needs |
|---|---|
| Your headline ("Marketing Manager | Growth | SaaS") | A target-role summary written for one specific job |
| Your About section, in profile voice | Two or three lines orienting a screener, or nothing at all |
| Every role you have ever listed | Relevant roles in depth, older ones compressed to a line |
| Responsibilities as written for browsing | Bullets with a decision and an outcome in them |
| LinkedIn's section order | The order that puts your strongest evidence first |
| A skills list ordered by endorsements | Skills matching the posting's own terminology |
| Whatever length your profile happens to be | A deliberate one or two pages |
None of this makes the export useless. It means the export is a complete inventory of your history in plain text, which is exactly the hard part to reconstruct from memory. The editing is the easy part.
The edits that turn it into a resume
Work through these in order. The first three matter most.
1. Replace the headline with a summary
A LinkedIn headline is optimised for search and for people scrolling a feed. A resume opens with something else: a short statement of what you are, how long you have done it, and the one thing you want remembered. Our guide on writing a resume summary covers the formula and worked examples. If you have nothing specific to say, cut it entirely — an empty summary is better than a generic one.
2. Rewrite the About section or delete it
Profile About sections are usually written in first person, often at length, and frequently in a register nobody uses in a resume. Either compress the substance into the summary above, or remove it. Do not paste it across unchanged.
3. Rewrite bullets as work, not responsibilities
This is the largest job and the one that matters most. LinkedIn encourages describing what a role involved. A resume needs what you did and what changed.
Responsible for managing the company's social media presence across multiple platforms, working closely with the design team and reporting on performance to senior stakeholders.
Rebuilt the posting schedule around three channels after cutting two that were absorbing a third of the effort for almost no reach. Took the weekly performance report from a slide deck to a one-page dashboard the leadership team reads without me presenting it.
The second is not longer. It contains a decision that could have gone the other way, and something that is different now. See resume action verbs for organising this by what each bullet is trying to prove.
4. Compress or cut old roles
Profiles accumulate. A resume should not. Roles older than roughly a decade, or unrelated to what you are applying for, usually collapse into a single line each — title, employer, years — or disappear. What earns space is relevance, not chronology.
5. Fix the section order
LinkedIn puts Education after Experience for everyone. If you graduated recently, education may belong first. If you have a certification the posting explicitly asks for, it should not be buried below a skills list ordered by who happened to endorse you.
6. Rebuild the skills list from the posting
Endorsement order reflects who clicked a button, not what this job needs. Rewrite the list using the posting's own terminology for the things you can genuinely do — the process in pulling keywords from a job description.
7. Rebuild the formatting
The export's layout is LinkedIn's, and it is not designed as a resume. Rebuild it in a single-column layout with conventional section headings, real text, and no contact details stranded in a header or footer — the specifics are in our guide on what makes an ATS-friendly resume.
Do not send the export as your application
It is visibly a LinkedIn printout, LinkedIn's branding is on it, and it is identical to what the reader could have pulled up themselves. Sending it reads as having skipped a step, because you have.
The export solves the blank page. It does not solve the resume.
Keeping the profile and the resume consistent
Once you have a real resume, the two documents will drift, and recruiters routinely open both. Contradictions between them — different dates, a title that grew, a role on one and not the other — are noticed, and they are the kind of discrepancy that is hard to explain innocently even when the explanation is innocent.
What must match exactly: employers, titles, and dates. Get these identical, including month boundaries.
What should differ, legitimately: the resume is tailored to one posting and the profile is not; the profile can be longer and can carry things a resume has no room for; the profile is written to be found, the resume to be screened. Nobody expects them to be the same document. They do expect them to describe the same career.
The practical rhythm is to update the profile when something actually changes — a promotion, a project finishing — and rebuild the resume per application from that maintained history. Updating the profile only when job hunting is what produces the mismatches.
Importing the export into a tool
Because the LinkedIn PDF is real text rather than a scan, it imports cleanly wherever a resume import is offered. SwiftCover takes a LinkedIn "Save to PDF" export directly and uses it as the basis for tailoring against a specific posting, which handles the rewriting-per-application part. The one-off cleanup above — the summary, the bullets, the section order — is still worth doing once on your base resume, because everything downstream is built from it.