Uploading a resume to LinkedIn is a great way to showcase your skills, experience, and qualifications to potential employers and connections. However, sometimes things can go wrong with the upload process, resulting in formatting issues, missing information, or other problems with how your resume appears on your profile.
Common LinkedIn Resume Upload Issues
There are a few main reasons why you may run into problems when uploading your resume to LinkedIn:
Formatting Gets Messed Up
One of the most frustrating issues is when the formatting of your resume gets scrambled during the upload. LinkedIn may strip out formatting like bullet points, italics, tabs, and columns. This can make your neatly formatted resume look like a big block of text.
This happens because LinkedIn only supports simple text formatting. So when you upload a Word doc or PDF with complex formatting, it tries to simplify it which can completely mess up how your resume looks.
Sections Get Mislabeled or Combined
LinkedIn tries to parse the different sections of your resume and apply standardized labels like “Experience” and “Education.” But if you use custom section headings, it may mislabel or combine different parts of your resume.
For example, if you have sections labeled “Relevant Experience” and “Other Work Experience,” LinkedIn may lump them together under “Experience.” Or if you have a skills section, it may get mislabeled as part of your experience.
Information Gets Cut Off
LinkedIn imposes character limits on certain fields when importing a resume. So if you exceed those limits, parts of your resume may get cut off. This is most common for job descriptions under each position in the experience section.
But other fields like the summary, skills, and endorsements sections also have character restrictions that may lead to information getting truncated if you hit the limit.
Custom Resume Designs Don’t Translate
If your resume has a custom design with logos, images, charts, or other visual elements, these likely won’t translate at all when uploading to LinkedIn. LinkedIn strips out all images and special formatting, so your resume will lose all of its visual design.
Special Characters Get Stripped Out
In some cases, special characters like en dashes, em dashes, and smart quotes get converted to normal dashes and quotes after uploading. This can negatively impact the readability of your resume, especially if used inconsistently.
Links and Email Addresses Go Missing
Any clickable links or email addresses in your resume will be stripped out by LinkedIn. You’ll need to manually re-add these if you want them clickable in your profile.
How to Avoid LinkedIn Resume Upload Problems
To help avoid formatting and information issues when uploading your resume, here are some tips:
Simplify Formatting Before Uploading
Start with a simply formatted Word or text document without complex formatting like columns, tables, or embedded images. Use simple bold and italic text sparingly. This will minimize scrambling of your resume sections and content.
Match Your Sections to LinkedIn’s Standard Labels
Use section headers like “Summary”, “Work Experience”, and “Education” that align with LinkedIn’s defaults. Avoid custom headers like “Professional Profile” or “Employment History” that may confuse the parser.
Break Up Lengthy Job Descriptions
Job descriptions under each experience entry should be 2-3 short bullet points summarizing your role and contributions. Avoid big paragraphs of text that are more likely to hit LinkedIn’s character limits.
Add Your Links Manually After Uploading
Rather than including hyperlinks in your resume, add them manually into the correct sections of your profile after uploading. This preserves clickable links to your website, online portfolio, etc.
Review and Edit Your Uploaded Resume
Always thoroughly review your LinkedIn resume after uploading and manually edit any sections that got scrambled, mislabeled, or truncated. Expect to do some cleanup after uploading.
Use LinkedIn’s Resume Assistant
LinkedIn offers a resume assistant feature that helps you build a resume directly within their system. This auto-populates the correct sections and allows you to stay within LinkedIn’s formatting restrictions.
Copy and Paste Text From Your Resume
Instead of uploading a file, you can copy and paste text directly into the different sections of your LinkedIn profile. This gives you more control to tailor content specifically to LinkedIn.
Delete Any Special Characters
Scan your resume text and remove any special characters like en dashes, em dashes, and smart quotes before uploading. Replace them with standard hyphens and quotes to avoid scrambling.
Fixing LinkedIn Resume Formatting Issues
If you’ve already uploaded your resume and the formatting is messed up, here are some tips for fixing the most common issues:
Reformat Blocks of Text as Bullet Points
For job descriptions or other sections that got merged into big blocks of text, try reformatting them using LinkedIn’s text editor to add bullet points and line breaks.
Break Up Sections into Distinct Entries
If different sections got incorrectly combined, like education and certifications, you can break them up again into separate entries using LinkedIn’s section controls.
Resize Sections for More Space
Try expanding the size of sections that got cut off due to character limits. For example, make your Experience section longer to fit full job descriptions.
Add Missing Headings Like Summary and Skills
If entire sections like your Summary or Skills are missing, add them back in using LinkedIn’s section tools. You can copy and paste the content back in.
Re-Add Hyperlinks
For any websites or email addresses you want clickable, re-add these using LinkedIn’s link insertion tool.
Run a Spell Check
Since formatting problems can also lead to jumbled words, always run a spell check on your sections to catch any issues.
Check Formatting on Mobile
Review how your resume looks on mobile after fixing formatting issues to catch any sections that still need work for mobile readers.
Preventing LinkedIn Resume Upload Issues
To avoid LinkedIn resume problems in the future:
Maintain a Simplified LinkedIn Version
Keep a separate version of your resume that’s been simplified and formatted specifically for LinkedIn in a Word or text document. Update this anytime you update your main resume.
Use Standard Section Names
Always use the same standard section labels that LinkedIn uses – like Summary, Experience, Education – so they import cleanly.
Summarize Job Descriptions
Write your job descriptions in a concise bulleted list format rather than lengthy paragraphs to prevent getting cut off.
Review After Uploading
Plan to spend 10-15 minutes reviewing and tweaking your LinkedIn resume after uploading to polish the formatting.
Update Your Resume Regularly
Don’t just “set and forget” your LinkedIn resume. Update it whenever you update your main resume to keep it current.
Key Takeaways
Uploading your resume into LinkedIn can introduce formatting problems, lost information, and other issues that negatively impact how it represents you to employers. Follow these best practices to avoid problems:
- Use simplified formatting without special characters or complex design elements.
- Match your sections to LinkedIn’s standard labels.
- Summarize job descriptions and break up long blocks of text.
- Manually add links and review carefully after uploading.
- Maintain a separate, simplified resume version just for LinkedIn.
Paying attention to LinkedIn’s formatting restrictions and reviewing your uploaded resume can help minimize issues and keep your profile looking polished for recruiters.