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Linkedin Resume Builder

Great Timesaver for Creating Your Resume?

The linkedin resume builder tool is most certainly a great idea, and capable of building you a nice looking CV / resume in seconds, presuming you have a complete Linkedin Profile.

With 11 templates to choose from the Linkedin resume builder / Linkedin CV builder / does a nice job of CV / resume formatting, and is the fastest way to generate a CV / resume I’ve seen.

There’s a but…

At the time of writing you have to use your Linkedin profile within your CV / resume, without being able to edit the resume profile separate from your Linkedin profile. This makes the Linkedin resume builder totally useless as an effective resume building tool.

Linkedin Profile – Why You Should Not Use It On Your Resume / CV

Until the Linkedin resume building tool allows a separate profile from your main Linkedin profile, it forces you to use your profile as it appears on Linkedin.

The problem is that a resume is written in the 3rd person with no ‘I’s, is concise, punchy, often bulleted, and there is rarely any humour. It’s a very traditional formal document. This is the last style of writing you want to adopt on a business / social network such as Linkedin, which though more formal than Facebook is still all about relationships, and should be written in the 1st person, demonstrating your skills and abilities for sure, but in a friendly personable style.

Also for your Linkedin profile to be most effective for getting you found for your skills keywords you need to sprinkle those keywords liberally through your profile. This is critical for job seekers and people looking to generate business relationships initiated through being found for their skills and abilities. You would never take this approach on a quality resume.
The Linkedin resume builder / Linkedin CV builder forces you to decide on a great Linkedin profile and poor / terrible resume, or visa versa.

Linkedin Resume Builder Great Resume or Great Linkedin Profile

So why not compromise and rewrite your Linkedin profile so that it could work on your resume as well?

In my opinion a great Linkedin profile is one of your strongest marketing tools, written correctly and supported by recommendations a good profile will enable you to be found by hirers / recruiters; in other words be headhunted, it will showcase your expertise, and enable you to build a powerful business network.

Please do not dilute the effectiveness of your Linkedin profile to attract you the right type of attention.

Your Linkedin profile and resume should work together hand in glove to help showcase your abilities above your competition. In its strongest form your resume will use an objective statement to marry your skills and attributes to the needs of your reader. Your Resume will most definitely contain a link to your Linkedin profile.

Your target reader will then check your profile, and seeing recommendations from people who have worked with you in the past will waste no more time, and contact you with view to an interview.
The perfect Resume Linkedin one two.

If you want to better understand how to optimize your Linkedin profile to get yourself on the rador of top recruiters / headhunters get my free guide 'Linkedin How To Get Headhunted'

If you are looking for a fast way to build a great resume, I would suggest typing into Google ‘Google docs resume template’. You’ll them be whisked off to Google docs where you can choose from thousands of resume templates that you can quickly, easily and freely populate with your own information.

For more on Free Resume Templates / Resume Forms

Not as fast as the Linkedin resume builder but infinitely more effective, until Linkedin open the editing capabilities somewhat.

For completeness I will explain how the Linkedin resume builder works.
If you want to try the Linkedin resume builder for yourself please follow the link .

Once at Linkedin labs sign in with your Linkedin login detail’s and choose from 11 professional templates. At this point the Linkedin resume builder imports all your profile details into the resume, for your to select which bits you want to show or hide.

At this point I have to say that this all works beautifully, it’s really easy to move the elements such as education and honours around within the resume, or discard the bits you don’t want.

The problem simply boils down to the fact that though a resume and your Linkedin profile are very similar, they are also fundamentally very different if you remove the slight overuse of skills keywords and personality form the Linkedin profile you will neuter it’s ability to get you found.

And if you leave your Linkedin profile optimized for your skills keywords, your personality, and written in the 1st person it will read badly as a resume.

I’ll be delighted to change my view on this if Linkedin enable greater editing capabilities.

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