Does LinkedIn keep your resume?

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 850 million members worldwide. As a platform built around resumes and career profiles, LinkedIn gives members the option to upload and display their resumes on their profile pages. This leads to the question – does LinkedIn keep your resume once it’s uploaded?

The Short Answer

Yes, LinkedIn does store and keep copies of resumes uploaded to user profiles. The resumes are stored as part of your profile data in LinkedIn’s databases. However, the visibility and access to your uploaded resume depends on your LinkedIn account settings.

Looking at the Details

When you upload your resume to LinkedIn, it gets stored as part of your profile data on their servers. LinkedIn keeps copies of all past resume versions you upload. So even if you replace your old resume with a new one, LinkedIn will still have copies of all your previously uploaded resumes.

LinkedIn uses the resumes you upload for a few purposes:

• Populating your LinkedIn profile sections with resume details
• Analyzing your skills, experience and other resume details
• Allowing other users to view or download your resume if your settings permit it
• Improving LinkedIn’s services using learnings extracted from member resumes

So in summary, yes LinkedIn persists copies of your uploaded resumes primarily to enhance your and others’ LinkedIn experiences via profile population, skills analysis and resume sharing.

Controlling the Visibility of Your Uploaded Resume

While LinkedIn keeps copies of your resume in their databases, you do have control over who can view or access it:

• Public – Anyone visiting your LinkedIn profile can view your resume
• Connections only – Only your 1st degree LinkedIn connections can view and access your resume
• Private – You control the visibility, only you can view or access the resume

You set these visibility options when first uploading your resume, and can change them later in your LinkedIn account settings. By default, the visibility is set to private.

So in summary, although LinkedIn stores your resume, you control the access to it via visibility settings like private or connections-only.

Deleting Your Uploaded Resumes

You can delete resumes previously uploaded to your LinkedIn account to remove them from visibility. But this only removes them from visibility on your profile, and does not completely erase them from LinkedIn’s databases.

To delete an uploaded resume:

1. Go to your LinkedIn profile
2. Click on the Manage my resumes link
3. Click on the X icon next to the resume you want to remove
4. Confirm the removal in the popup dialog

Once deleted from your profile, the resume will no longer be visible or accessible to anyone. However, LinkedIn will likely still retain a copy in their databases for analytical purposes.

So in summary, you can essentially hide resumes from your profile, but cannot completely force LinkedIn to permanently delete copies of your resumes from their storage systems.

Downloading Your Uploaded Resumes

While you cannot force LinkedIn to delete your uploaded resume copies, you can download copies of resumes you have uploaded:

1. Go to your LinkedIn profile
2. Click on the Manage my resumes link
3. Click the download icon next to the resume to download it

This allows you to retrieve a copy of your resume in PDF format. So even if you delete it from your LinkedIn profile, you will still have a downloaded copy.

Closing Thoughts

In closing, the key points to remember are:

• LinkedIn keeps and persists copies of all resumes you upload
• You control visibility of your uploaded resumes via privacy settings
• Deleting removes resume visibility but LinkedIn still retains a copy
• You can download copies of resumes you upload

So while LinkedIn keeps your resume copies indefinitely, you do have control over resume visibility and can download your own copies as needed.

Conclusion

To conclude:

• LinkedIn stores and keeps all resumes users upload to their profiles
• The visibility of your resume to others depends on your account settings
• You can delete resumes from your profile, but LinkedIn will still retain copies
• You can download copies of any resumes you upload
• So LinkedIn persists your resumes, but gives you control over visibility and access

Therefore, while LinkedIn keeps your resumes, you determine how visible they are to others on the platform through your configured privacy settings.

So in summary, while LinkedIn retains your resumes, you control the visibility through your account settings. You can remove resumes from visibility but LinkedIn will still have copies.

Key Points Recap

• LinkedIn stores all member resumes indefinitely
• You control resume visibility to others via settings
• Deleting only removes visibility, LinkedIn still retains a copy
• You can always download your uploaded resumes
• So LinkedIn keeps your resumes, but gives you control