LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 722 million members worldwide. As a career-focused social media platform, LinkedIn allows you to showcase your work experience, education, skills, and accomplishments to connect with other professionals.
While highlighting your professional background can be beneficial for networking and career opportunities, you may wish to exclude certain jobs or periods of employment from your LinkedIn profile at times. For example, if you are currently employed but discreetly seeking new job opportunities, showing your full work history could alert your current employer. Or you may wish to remove work experience that is no longer relevant to your career path.
Fortunately, LinkedIn provides options to control what work experience appears on your profile. In this article, we’ll explain how you can stop LinkedIn from displaying your full work history and select what jobs are shown.
Hide Your Current Job
If you wish to conceal your current job while actively looking for new roles, you can easily toggle your current position on and off your LinkedIn profile:
- Access your LinkedIn account and go to your profile page.
- Find the experience section and click on your current position.
- Look for the “Show/Hide” toggle on the right side and switch it to “No” or “Hide.”
This will immediately remove your current job from your profile view. Other LinkedIn members looking at your profile will not see this position.
To display your current job again, simply return to the experience page and toggle “Show” or “Yes.” Note that each experience has separate show/hide settings, so you can choose to display some jobs while hiding others.
Remove Past Positions
In addition to concealing your current role, you can also delete past work experiences from your LinkedIn profile:
- Go to your profile and click on the experience you want to remove.
- Look for the “Delete” button on the right side and click on it.
- Confirm that you want to permanently delete this position from your profile.
This will completely erase the work experience, education, or volunteer experience from your LinkedIn profile. However, some restrictions apply:
- You cannot delete your current position – you can only hide it.
- If the experience is included on your resume, you must remove it from your resume first before deleting it from LinkedIn.
- You cannot delete positions within the last 10 years.
So in summary, while you can instantly toggle your current job on or off, removing old positions has some limitations. LinkedIn restricts deleting recent work history to maintain profile accuracy and completeness.
Rearrange Positions
If you are unable to fully delete experiences from your profile, another option is to rearrange the order in which they appear. You can push older, irrelevant jobs further down on your profile so they are less prominent:
- From your profile, click “Edit” on the experience you want to move.
- Drag and drop the position to change its order.
- Click “Save” to lock in your new sequence.
Rearranging your work history allows you to curate what roles stand out on your profile. Make sure your most relevant, important experiences catch a recruiter’s eye immediately.
Exclude Experiences from Public View
LinkedIn also allows you to control what sections visitors can see when they land on your public profile:
- Go to your profile edit page and select “Show profile sections” on the right rail.
- Toggle off any sections you want to hide like Skills, Accomplishments, Education, etc.
- Under “Featured” and “Additional” sections, click the eye icon to exclude individual experiences.
- Click “Save” at the bottom of the page.
Now when someone views your profile, those sections will be collapsed and experiences hidden from public view. However, they may still be visible to recruiters and hiring managers if included on your full profile or resume.
Remove Company Followers
If you are concerned about your current employer seeing changes you make to your LinkedIn profile, you can remove followers from your company:
- Go to your list of followers under “Manage my network.”
- Type your company name in the search bar.
- Hover over each follower and click “Remove” to unfollow them.
This will ensure your current coworkers and managers no longer get notifications about your profile changes. Use caution removing followers you wish to keep in your network.
Other Privacy Settings
A few other profile and privacy settings can help minimize your exposure on LinkedIn:
- Turn on “Select who can see your activity feed” in settings and exclude your company.
- Disable profile viewing notifications under “Privacy & Settings.”
- Select “Only you” under customized public profile URL.
- Use the “Job seeking preferences” to exclude your profile from recruiter searches.
Leverage LinkedIn’s privacy controls to quietly manage how your profile appears during a job search. Restrict notifications and limit visibility from current colleagues.
Conclusion
While LinkedIn provides professional exposure, you may need to selectively conceal portions of your work history for discretion. Use LinkedIn’s profile settings to:
- Hide your current job while actively looking for a new position.
- Delete old, irrelevant experiences from your profile.
- Rearrange positions to highlight your most relevant experience.
- Exclude jobs from public view but keep them on private profile.
- Remove followers from your current company.
- Limit profile visibility and notifications to current employer.
With these tips, you can thoughtfully curate your LinkedIn profile and work history visibility during a job search or career transition. Showcase the experience that matters while minimizing unnecessary exposure.