Your LinkedIn profile is one of your most valuable career-building tools.
It serves as your online resume or CV on one of the most popular recruiting web sites on the Internet: LinkedIn.com.
Every day, recruiters and employers search LinkedIn profiles to find job candidates.
So creating a good profile is key to being found for your next career opportunity.
Like a traditional chronological resume, a LinkedIn profile has the following major sections:
- Summary
- Skills
- Experience
- Education
So it’s really quite easy to use your resume to create a LinkedIn profile. And LinkedIn has a good profile builder that you can use to copy and paste your resume, section-by-section.
Why Copy and Paste from Your Resume?
Why not type your information straight into the Profile Builder? Because you’ve already taken great care to create a well-thought-out and typo-free resume. You used Word’s spell check feature, and, hopefully, you asked someone to proofread each line of your resume.
By copying and pasting from your “perfect resume,” you avoid the risk of having mistakes in your LinkedIn Profile, and there will be no discrepancies between your master resume and your LinkedIn master resume (employers do compare the two!).
How to Convert Your Resume into a LinkedIn Profile
First, you need to create your master resume, the one you use as a foundation for making a target resume each time you apply for a particular job. Because your master resume presents a broad picture of who you are as a professional, and the value you offer to your professional community, its content will be excellent for your LinkedIn profile.
- Click on Master Resume for Your LinkedIn Profile to learn how to create your master resume.
- With your completed master resume document open, go to your LinkedIn account.
- In the toolbar, hover your cursor over Profile, and click Edit Profile from the pull-down menu. The page displays your current profile.
Let’s go section-by-section to see how to use your master resume to create your LinkedIn profile.
LinkedIn Headline
Make your title as specific as possible so it will serve as a concise personal branding statement (see Meg Guiseppi’s Creating Your Personal Brand article for tips) that sets you apart from other people on LinkedIn who share your name.
There’s a limit of 120 characters and spaces for your headline. Use keywords that are pertinent to your industry and that recruiters would use to search for someone with your skill set and/or job title.
- Near the top of the page, click the Edit link next to your Name.
- On the next page (Basic Information), enter your name as you want it to appear in your profile.
- If you have a professional title on your resume, copy and paste that into the Headline field. If you don’t have a title on your resume, write one for your profile.
- Fill in the fields for Location and Industry, and then click Save Changes.
Summary (About Section)
Consider copying and pasting the statements from your general resume into the Summary field. Use bullet points (or another symbol such as a dash or asterisk) to separate your statements. Avoid putting your info in big paragraphs, as big blocks of text are not inviting to read.
If bullet points don’t transfer when you copy and paste your statements, no problem. Find another LinkedIn that has bullet points in its profile (such as mine at https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanireland) and copy and paste them into your profile.
- Go back to the Edit Profile page.
- Click the Edit link next to the Summary heading. This takes you to a page where you can enter statements that summarize what you have to offer (and want to do for) your next employer.
- Fill in the Specialties field and click Save Changes to go back to the Edit Profile page.
Experience
Again, use bullet points as you did in the Summary section.
- Click the + Add a Position link next to the Experience heading.
- On the next page, enter the information for your most recent job, including bullet point statements under each job title. For much of this you can copy and paste from your general resume.
- When you’ve finished entering everything for your new position, click Save Changes to go back to the Edit Profile page.
Add more positions until you have your Experience section completed. Note that at any point you can click Edit next to one of your job titles and make changes to what you wrote for that job. You can also rearrange the order of your jobs (so they’re in reverse chronology) by using the drag-and-drop feature.
Education
Click + Add a School next to the Education heading, and copy and paste details about your education from your resume.
Other Sections
Now that you have the hang of how the LinkedIn profile builder works, you can add other sections if they’re relevant to your career. Here’s a list of additional sections you can create:
- Certifications
- Courses
- Honors and Awards
- Languages
- Organizations
- Projects
- Patents
- Publications
- Test Scores
- Volunteer Experience & Causes
Reordering Sections of the Profile
When you’re on the Edit Profile page, you can use the drag-and-drop feature to reorder the major sections of your resume. To figure out what order is best, use the same thinking you used when you prioritized the sections on your resume: Most relevant first.
The Bottom Line on Creating a Great LinkedIn Profile From Your Resume
If you already have a master chronological resume, you can easily use it to create a good LinkedIn profile by copying and pasting each section into the LinkedIn profile builder. Then, as you move through your career, remember to update both your master resume on your hard drive and your LinkedIn profile on the Internet. That way you’ll always be ready for the next professional opportunity that fits your career goals.
More Information About Master Resumes
About the author…
Susan Ireland is the author of four job search books including The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Perfect Resume. For more information about writing your resume check out The Damn Good Resume website which Susan manages.
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