How to Turn Your LinkedIn Profile Into a Resume (Step by Step)

You have already done the hard part. Every role, date, skill and accomplishment you would put on a resume is sitting in your LinkedIn profile right now. The problem is that LinkedIn and a resume are two different formats — and copying and pasting between them by hand is slow and error-prone.

This guide walks through how to turn your LinkedIn profile into a proper resume: what to reuse, what to change, and how to end up with a document that both recruiters and applicant tracking systems can actually read.

Why your LinkedIn profile is not a resume (yet)

A LinkedIn profile is built for browsing. It is long, conversational, and designed to be scrolled. A resume is built for scanning. It is one to two pages, tightly written, and optimized for a specific job.

The other big difference is who reads it. Before a human ever sees your resume, it usually passes through an applicant tracking system (ATS) that parses the text into fields. If your document is a screenshot, a fancy multi-column design, or a PDF exported from a slide tool, the ATS can mangle it. That is why formatting matters as much as content — more on that in our guide to ATS-friendly resumes.

Step 1: Get your LinkedIn data out

There are two common ways to pull your profile into resume form.

• LinkedIn’s “Save to PDF” export. On your profile, open the More menu and choose Save to PDF. This gives you a compact document — but it drops or truncates several sections (skills, some certifications, longer education lists) and locks the layout, so you cannot edit it. See our walkthrough on exporting your LinkedIn profile as a PDF for the details and limits.
• A dedicated importer. Tools like exportmyresume.com read your profile and rebuild it as editable resume sections — experience, education, skills, projects and more — so you keep the structure without the copy-paste.

Whichever route you take, the goal of this step is the same: get your history into fields you can shape, not a flat page you cannot touch.

Step 2: Trim to what matters for the job

A resume is not your whole career — it is the version of your career that fits the role you want. Once your profile is imported:

• Cut old or irrelevant roles. Anything more than 10–15 years back can usually go, or shrink to a single line.
• Lead with impact, not duties. Turn “Responsible for managing the analytics dashboard” into “Owned the analytics stack and cut reporting time from days to minutes.”
• Add numbers. Percentages, dollars, time saved, team size, scale. Recruiters skim for results, and ATS rank concrete achievements higher than vague ones.
• Keep it to one or two pages. Two pages is the sweet spot for most experienced candidates; one page for early-career.

Step 3: Make it ATS-readable

This is where most homemade resumes fail. To stay parseable:

• Use a single-column layout with standard section headings (Experience, Education, Skills).
• Export real, selectable text — not an image or a screenshot.
• Avoid tables, text boxes and graphics for anything the parser needs to read.
• Name the file clearly, e.g. Jane-Doe-Resume.pdf.

If you want the full checklist, read What is an ATS-friendly resume.

Step 4: Tailor it to each application

The single biggest lever on your interview rate is tailoring. ATS score resumes largely by keyword overlap with the job description, so a generic resume loses to a targeted one almost every time.

For each application:

1. Read the job posting and note the repeated skills and tools.
2. Make sure the ones you genuinely have appear in your resume — in your skills list and in context inside your bullet points.
3. Mirror the posting’s wording where it is honest to do so (“go-to-market” vs “GTM”, “React” vs “ReactJS”).

We break this down in Resume keywords: how to tailor your CV to any job.

Step 5: Export and send

Export as PDF for most online applications and email attachments — it preserves layout while staying text-based. Keep a DOCX copy for portals that specifically ask for Word, and a plain-text version for copy-pasting into application forms.

The fast way

If step-by-step sounds like a lot, that is exactly the gap tools were built to close. With exportmyresume.com you import your LinkedIn profile once, fine-tune the wording, and export an ATS-ready PDF, DOCX or TXT — usually in under ten minutes, with no design work.

Either way, the principle is the same: reuse the history you already wrote on LinkedIn, then reshape it for the job and the machine that reads it first.