What this can and cannot do
ProfileSmith does not scrape LinkedIn and does not act on your LinkedIn account.
What it never touches
- We never ask for your LinkedIn password and there is nothing to log into. ProfileSmith has no accounts at all.
- There is no browser extension, and there never will be. LinkedIn’s User Agreement forbids software that overlays or modifies the service, and the tools that tried it have been shut down.
- We do not send connection requests, messages, comments, likes or posts on your behalf, and we do not read your connections, your inbox or anybody else’s profile. Tools that do those things get their users restricted and banned.
- The only thing that moves between LinkedIn and ProfileSmith is a PDF you downloaded yourself from your own profile, or text you copied off your own profile and pasted in.
Where the free scan is limited
- There are two ways in: LinkedIn’s own Save to PDF export, or the text of your profile pasted straight into the box on the front page. Either way we look for the headings LinkedIn prints — About or Summary, and Experience. A CV you wrote yourself, a scanned image, or a PDF from another site will be rejected rather than guessed at.
- LinkedIn’s export only carries your top skills, not all of them, so we do not score your skills list. Grading you on a list we cannot see in full would be dishonest. That is also why pasting your profile scores exactly the same as the PDF: the skills we would be missing are skills we never graded.
- LinkedIn caps Save to PDF at 200 downloads per member per month and offers it in English on desktop only. That is their limit, not ours — it is why the paste box exists, and pasting is the way in on a phone or on a profile in any other language.
- The scan judges structure and evidence — length against the real field limits, missing sections, blank roles, numbers, stock phrases. It does not judge whether your career is impressive, and it cannot tell whether what you wrote is true.
- Files over 10 MB are refused, and so is a paste over 100,000 characters. A profile export is far smaller than the first, and a whole profile is far shorter than the second.
What happens to your file
Nothing. The PDF is read by your own browser and never sent to us, and pasted text is read the same way — it is never uploaded either. So there is no copy of your profile to store, leak or sell. Close the tab and it is gone.
The $29 rewrite is the one exception, and only if you choose it. Clicking Get the rewrite hands the text we pulled out of your PDF or your paste to your own browser tab and sends you to Polar to pay. When you come back, that text is posted to our server, the rewrite is written, and it is emailed to you. The text is used to write your rewrite and for nothing else — not training, not a mailing list, not resale.
There is a second thing you can choose, and it is the only other way anything reaches us. Under your score is a field that emails you the results. Ask for it and we receive your email address, your score, and which of the eight checks passed — and that is the whole list. Not your profile text. The version on screen quotes your headline back at you and names your thin roles; the emailed version cannot, because your browser did that part and it never came near us. So the email carries the checks and your verdicts, and says so in the message itself.
We use that address to send the one email and we do not store it, so there is nothing to unsubscribe from — and to make the cap real rather than a promise, our email provider refuses a second message to the same address within a day. If you never type an address and never click Get the rewrite, we never receive a thing.
Buying means we have your email address, so here is exactly what we do with it. You get the rewrite, you get it again each time you ask for another (three per order), and three days later you get one message asking whether it worked. That is all of it. We do not keep the address in a list and we have no list to keep it in. The follow-up is booked with our email provider the moment you buy, so it is scheduled before you could ask us not to send it — it carries a one-click unsubscribe header and it is the only message of its kind there is. The address comes from Polar, who take the payment, and goes to Resend, who carry the email. Nobody else sees it.
The one exception, stated so the sentence above stays exactly true: if the reader crashes on your file, or refuses your file or your paste for not looking like a LinkedIn profile, our error monitoring records that it happened. That report contains the software fault and nothing taken from your document or your paste — not the text, not your name, not the file name. We keep it because a reader that breaks silently is a reader nobody fixes.
We also count visits and scans, so we know whether anybody is using this. Eight events, no cookie, no IP address kept, and a new random id every browser tab, so we cannot follow you between visits. A finished scan sends the band your score fell into — under 40, 40–59, 60–79, or 80 and up — because we need to know whether the scan is telling people anything useful. Nothing we count carries a word of your text, your name or the file name, and unless you ask us to email you the results, that band is the only thing derived from your profile that ever leaves your browser.
Who we are
ProfileSmith is built by Geary Works, 1380 Rio Rancho Blvd SE #470, Rio Rancho, New Mexico 87124. mike@gearyworks.com. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to LinkedIn Corporation.