Using LinkedIn to generate a PDF “resume

I ran across a post on one of my LinkedIn groups from a fellow member named Mike Smith, the text of this post is on his blog at http://dominoconsultant.blogspot.com/2008/12/export-pdf-resume-from-linkedin-without.html

Basically the trick is to make sure your profile on LinkedIn is up to date with all of your best resume information in the career section, then use the magic icon on your profile to produce a PDF. My friend Walt Feigenson posted an entry on his blog that takes this idea one step further by introducing a web site that allows you to pick and choose which pages to include in the PDF before you send it. Walt’s post can be found at http://feigenson.us/blog/?p=163

While this isn’t an ideal resume, it does get to the “good enough” level for recruiters (assuming you’ve actually updated your profile with all the salient information), and as Walt points out, you can extend the idea by splitting out information like your references to send along to a hiring manager.

A couple of people suggested to me that perhaps using a PDF printer would be an easier way to accomplish this same task. The advantage that using the PDF button on LinkedIn has over this approach is that it produces a nicely formatted version of your profile, which doesn’t include all of the buttons and other things that are displayed on your profile. By downloading the PDF in the format that LinkedIn produces, you get a relatively simple resume that you can send out (either with the technique that Walt talks about, or printing to a PDF printer the pages you want to keep).