Having an up-to-date LinkedIn profile is crucial for any job seeker. Your LinkedIn profile serves as an online resume that recruiters and hiring managers will likely view when considering you for job opportunities. One question that often comes up is whether you should delete irrelevant or outdated positions from your work experience section.
The Pros of Removing Irrelevant Jobs from LinkedIn
Here are some potential benefits of removing irrelevant or outdated jobs from your LinkedIn profile:
- Presents a more focused work history: Removing irrelevant roles can create a cleaner, more streamlined work history that showcases your most relevant experience for your target career path.
- Improves your personal branding: Keeping old, irrelevant positions on your profile can dilute your personal brand if those roles portray a different image than your current professional identity.
- Prevents confusion: Listing jobs that are totally unrelated to your current career aspirations may leave recruiters scratching their heads about your work history and goals.
- Frees up space for more important roles: LinkedIn only displays the first 10 positions in your experience section, so removing irrelevant jobs allows you to feature positions more central to your narrative.
- Looks more up-to-date: If the jobs you’re removing are very old, deleting them can make your work history look more current.
The Cons of Removing Irrelevant Jobs from LinkedIn
On the other hand, there are also some potential downsides to consider before deleting old or irrelevant positions:
- Gaps in work history: Removing too many jobs can create large gaps in your employment history if you don’t have enough roles to fill in the space, which can raise questions.
- Less work experience listed: Similarly, reducing your work history can diminish the overall amount of experience you’re showcasing.
- Loss of connections: Former colleagues from those jobs may no longer feel as connected to your profile and may not interact with your profile as often.
- Reduced opportunities for endorsements: Fewer positions means fewer opportunities to gain endorsements and recommendations.
- Harder to showcase transferable skills: Even irrelevant roles may have provided you with valuable transferable skills that you want to highlight.
Tips for Removing Irrelevant Jobs
If you decide to remove irrelevant or outdated positions from your LinkedIn profile, here are some tips for doing it strategically:
- Keep your most recent roles: Never delete your most recent 2-3 positions. Recruiters want to see where you are working now.
- Keep roles relevant to your target: Preserve key jobs that align with the narrative you want your profile to tell.
- Remove jobs over 10+ years old: Jobs from over 10 years ago that are unrelated to your current career are prime candidates for removal.
- Keep notable companies on your profile: Even if the role itself is no longer relevant, some brand name employers are worth keeping for name recognition alone.
- Keep early roles to showcase progression: Displaying promotion timelines can illustrate your upward career mobility over time.
- Replace with volunteer work or projects: Swap out irrelevant roles with volunteer experiences, freelance projects, or academic programs related to your goals.
When deleting jobs, you can simply select “Remove” from the “Actions” dropdown menu for each position you want to remove on your LinkedIn profile. Remember that if you ever need to add a position back, you’ll have to re-enter all the job details from scratch.
Options Other Than Removing Jobs
If you’re hesitant about removing positions entirely, here are a few other options to handle irrelevant or outdated jobs on your LinkedIn profile:
- Leave older roles and just trim details: Cutting the descriptions down to bare minimum details takes up less space.
- List student jobs under one combined entry: Group retail, restaurant, or other student jobs together into a single generic entry like “Various Student Positions.”
- Add contextual details to past roles: Elaborate on transferable skills or responsibilities that relate more directly to your goals.
- Add a Profile Summary: Use this section to focus on your most relevant qualifications upfront.
- Add a Courses or Licenses & Certifications section: Highlight other credentials not evident from your work history alone.
- Bolster your Skills section: Include important keywords recruiters may be searching for.
Should You Remove Irrelevant Jobs or Just Hide Them?
LinkedIn gives you the option to not just remove positions from your profile, but to “hide” them instead. Hidden positions will not be visible to the public or search engines, but will still appear on the back end of your LinkedIn profile.
Here are some cases where hiding irrelevant jobs might make more sense than removing them entirely:
- If you might want recruiters to see the full history in the future.
- If you are currently unemployed and hiding old jobs avoids a resume gap.
- If you want to preserve your connections from that job.
- If the role provided key skills you still want to endorse.
The Effect of Removing Jobs on Your LinkedIn Network
It’s important to note that removing positions from your LinkedIn profile can impact your connections associated with those jobs. Here’s what happens when you remove a job:
- You’ll remain 1st-level connections with anyone you connected with individually.
- 2nd and 3rd-degree connections through that job will be removed.
- You’ll stay in any LinkedIn Groups associated with that job.
- Shared connections are unlikely to be significantly impacted.
In most cases, the overall effect on your network size will be minimal. But for jobs where you made lots of connections, you may notice a drop in your total connections. The benefit is you’ll be left with only the most relevant connections that align with your current goals.
Will Removing Jobs Impact Your LinkedIn SEO?
From an SEO perspective, removing irrelevant or outdated positions likely won’t negatively impact your LinkedIn search optimization much, if at all. Especially if you’re swapping those positions out with other keywords and information relevant to your target roles.
That said, abruptly deleting a bunch of jobs all at once may temporarily dilute your overall profile completeness and content volume. So aim to do it gradually. The key is crafting an overall profile focused on showcasing your best qualifications aligned to your goals.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, it’s ultimately a personal decision whether to remove previous jobs from your LinkedIn profile. Focus on crafting the optimal profile narrative for your career goals, and remove irrelevant positions as needed to highlight your most relevant experience and qualifications.
Just be mindful about suddenly leaving large resume gaps or torpedoing your number of connections. With strategic removal and optimization, you can shape your LinkedIn presence into a focused, up-to-date personal brand that showcases your greatest career assets.