LinkedIn's Save to PDF export
LinkedIn will hand you your profile as a PDF: More on your own profile, then Save to PDF. It is free, it takes two clicks, and it is not a CV. It is worth understanding precisely what is in that file, because it has one genuine advantage that nothing else can replicate, and several problems that are not obvious until a recruiter's software reads it.
What the file actually looks like
The export is a two-column document. A narrow left sidebar carries Contact, Top Skills, Languages and Certifications. The wide right column carries your name, headline, location, summary, then experience and education in order.
It is a faithful transcript of your profile, and that is the problem. A profile is written to be browsed. A CV is written to be skimmed in about eight seconds by someone with forty of them. The export makes no editorial decisions at all: every role you have ever added is present at the same weight, in the same detail, in the order LinkedIn stores them.
The reading order problem
A PDF has no columns. It has a sequence of drawing instructions, and software that reads the file follows that sequence. In LinkedIn's export the sidebar is written first, so a parser reading the file top to bottom meets your certifications and skills before it reaches your name.
This is the single most common way a two-column CV confuses an applicant tracking system: not the visible columns, but the order the text was written in. We go through the mechanics of that, and the three other things that break parsing, in will a designed CV pass an ATS?
The one thing it has that scraping cannot get
Your email address and phone number.
Those are not rendered into the profile page as text. They sit behind the contact overlay, and a tool that reads the page as you see it will not find them. LinkedIn puts them into the PDF export because the export is for you.
This is why our extension accepts the export as an input as well as reading the page. Import the PDF and you get contact details filled in. Read the page and you get a more current profile but an empty email field, which you then type once. The difference is worth knowing before you pick a route.
What the export tends to miss
- Anything LinkedIn only previews. Long sections are truncated on the profile with a "Show all 9 experiences" link, and truncation carries into some exports. Check the count against what you know you have.
- Formatting in descriptions. Bullets you typed as characters survive. Anything relying on the page's own layout does not.
- Any sense of priority. A three-month contract from 2013 gets the same room as the job you want to be hired for.
When the export is the right answer
It is genuinely fine as an archive of your profile, as a source of your own contact details, and as something to paste into an application form that asks you to upload "a CV" and then re-types it into fields anyway. It is a poor thing to send to a person you want to impress, because it looks like what it is: a database record printed out.
What to do instead
Whatever you use, the work is the same three steps. Take the profile as raw material rather than as a finished document. Cut it to the roles that argue for the job you are applying for, which usually means the last ten years and anything genuinely relevant before that. Then get it onto one page without shrinking it into unreadability, which is its own problem with a correct order of operations.
linkedinto.cv reads either source: the profile page, or a Save to PDF export you already have. It renders the result as vector text in five layouts, fits it to one page, and does all of it on your computer. See what it produces.