How to Put a LinkedIn Profile and Portfolio Link on Your Resume

Not every resume needs both. Include a LinkedIn link if your profile is complete and consistent with your resume. Many recruiters look people up on LinkedIn whether or not you list it, so it's worth making sure what they find is accurate. If your profile is half-finished, fix it before you add the link, or leave the link off for now. Include a portfolio link if the work itself is part of how you get hired. That covers designers, writers, editors, photographers, video editors, web developers, marketers, architects, and teachers who share lesson plans or sample units. It can also help career changers who built projects to show new skills, such as a data analysis dashboard or a small website. Skip the portfolio link if you have nothing to show yet, or if the only work you could share is confidential or belongs to a past employer. A nurse, forklift operator, or bookkeeper usually doesn't need one. A clean LinkedIn profile is enough for most roles outside creative and technical fields.

Put both links in your contact line at the top, next to your phone number and email. Use plain text on one or two lines, separated by a vertical bar or a bullet. For example: Maria Lopez Denver, CO | 555-014-2290 | maria.lopez@email.com linkedin.com/in/maria-lopez-denver | marialopezdesign.com Drop the "https://www." part. It takes up space and adds nothing a person needs to read. You can still make the text a clickable hyperlink in your document, and it will work when you save as a PDF. Write out the address instead of using a label like "LinkedIn Profile" alone. If someone prints your resume, a label can't be clicked and they'd have no way to find the page. Keep the links in the main body of the page, not in a header or footer area of a Word file or in an icon-only graphic. Some applicant tracking systems can miss text in those spots, and a small icon with no visible address is useless on paper. Our guide on resume header format covers the rest of your contact information. If you have a portfolio and a LinkedIn profile, list both. If you also have a GitHub page or a similar site that's relevant to the job, you can add it, but limit yourself to two or three links total. More than that looks cluttered and gives the reader too many choices.

Start by creating a short custom URL. LinkedIn gives new profiles an address with a long string of letters and numbers. In your profile settings you can edit the public profile URL to something like linkedin.com/in/maria-lopez-denver. Use your name, and add a city or middle initial if your name is common. Avoid nicknames and numbers that look random. Then compare your profile with your resume. Job titles, employers, and dates should match. If your resume says you were a Shift Supervisor from 2021 to 2024 and LinkedIn says Store Manager from 2020 to present, a reader will notice. Small differences in wording are fine, since LinkedIn can be a little looser, but dates and titles should agree. Check how the profile looks to strangers. Open it in a private browser window, or log out, and see what shows. Make sure your public profile is turned on, your headline says what you do (for example, "Customer Support Specialist | Billing and Account Resolution"), and your photo, if you use one, is a plain, recent headshot. If you're between jobs, you don't need to announce it in the headline. Describing the work you want to do is enough.

Link to the page where your best work lives, not to a cluttered folder. A reviewer may spend only a minute or two on it. Pick three to five pieces that are closest to the job you're applying for, and put them first. If you're applying for a content marketing job, lead with a few articles and a campaign you ran, not every school paper you've written. You don't need a fancy website. A simple personal site, a public Google Drive or Dropbox folder, a Behance or Dribbble page, a GitHub profile with a clear README on each project, or a one-page PDF case study can all work. Whatever you pick, open the link while logged out and again on your phone. If it asks for a password, a sign-in, or permission to view, fix that before you send it. Add a short note about each piece so the reader knows what they're looking at: your role, the goal, and the result if you have one. You can also tie your resume to the portfolio directly. For example, under a project entry: Redesigned a local bakery's online ordering page; online orders rose from about 10 to 25 a week (case study at marialopezdesign.com/bakery) Use a number only if you actually know it. If you don't have one, describe what you did and what changed. For more on writing these entries, see our guide to listing projects on your resume. If the work was done for an employer, check that you're allowed to show it. Blur or remove client names, financial figures, and anything covered by a confidentiality agreement, or describe it in words instead.

The most common problem is a link that doesn't work: a typo, a private profile, an expired free trial of a website builder, or a page that moved. Click every link in the final file, not just in your draft. Other things to avoid: - Long, messy addresses with tracking codes, such as anything that follows a question mark in the URL. Trim it to the clean version. - Link shorteners like bit.ly. They hide where the link goes and can look suspicious to someone reading a printed copy. - Personal social media accounts such as Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, unless the content is directly part of the job, like social media management. - An empty or outdated portfolio. A site with one placeholder page and "coming soon" is worse than no link. - A portfolio with unrelated or weak work mixed in. Take down anything you wouldn't want an employer to open. - Blue underlined text that's hard to read when printed. If you use hyperlink formatting, make sure it still looks neat in black and white. Also avoid writing "References available" or "See LinkedIn for more" in place of real content. The resume itself should stand on its own, and the links are extra.

Save your resume as a PDF unless the employer asks for something else, and then test it. Click each link in the PDF, then open the PDF on a phone to see that the text isn't cut off and the links still work. Our guide on resume file format explains when to use PDF and when to use Word. If you're applying through an online form, paste your LinkedIn and portfolio URLs into the website fields as plain text too. Many forms have a place for them, and the text on your resume may not be read the same way. It's also worth checking your links every time you tailor the resume. If you send a design resume, point to design work. If you apply for a project coordinator job, you might link to a project plan or a short case study instead. And if you're gathering your old resumes, performance reviews, and work samples to build a new version, aNewJob can create the resume from documents you already have, so you can add the links once you've cleaned them up.