[Explained] How to Delete Your LinkedIn Account in 7 Easy Steps

Whether you are an individual or an organization, your LinkedIn account significantly impacts your future career prospects. But should you delete❌ your existence from this professional platform? And if you delete your profile, can it be recovered again? We’ll find out here!

With changing times and resources, professionals worldwide are learning to utilize social profiles to showcase their skills and trades. LinkedIn is among the World’s most prominent professional networking platforms that provide a direct connectivity channel between companies, recruiters, and job seekers.

Why is LinkedIn Beneficial for the Working Professionals?

LinkedIn has also changed the pattern of job searching🧑‍💻, recruitment, job postings, and direct hiring. While it is also an equivalent interactive social media platform to make individual connections, join peer groups, pages, and newsletters, or create posts and polls on various topics.

Additionally, the users can create an impressive profile focusing on various parameters defining their professional skills, certifications, educational background, and career experiences. You can also take skill tests and apply to industrial courses sponsored by the LinkedIn platform that may help with knowledge enhancement.

You can use this social networking platform to create a network with experienced professionals in the same industry in different organizations🏢. Besides, you can interact with them to learn about their working patterns, expertise, or how you can grow in this field.

This platform is an excellent place for recruiters🧑‍💼. It gives them a platform to search and shortlist potential job seekers with required expertise levels and analyze their achievements in profiles. Here is how you can enable private mode on LinkedIn and view someone’s profile without letting him know.

There is much more to do on this social site for working professionals, but situations might force you to delete or deactivate your account.

Possible Reasons Why You Wish to Delete Your LinkedIn Account

LinkedIn has over 930 million global users and 58 million listed brands engaging in marketing and recruiting activities. The platform records 16.2% of users logging in daily, while 61 million perform weekly job searches for career upgradation.

That’s sufficient data to believe in the authenticity and feasibility of this social site for networking and getting professional mileage. But it is an individual’s preference and requirement to stay as an active member or deactivate the account either temporarily or permanently.

Here is a brief analysis of the situations when you must delete the account.

• Own multiple ids: If, by any chance or intent, you own more than one account🖥️ on LinkedIn, then it is evident that both cannot benefit you simultaneously. On the contrary, the prospects who come across two or more profiles of an individual will question its credibility.
• Unable to manage: If you regularly receive messages or notifications from clients and other potential sales prospects but cannot revert them in time due to a busy schedule. In such a case deactivating the profile for some time is better than showing a hostile gesture of avoidance.
• Abstaining from social networking: Social media has become an addiction, and therefore, you want to delete the account and reduce your screen time⏱️.
• Fed up with notifications: Unnecessary notifications of posts, events, comments, hirings, etc., keep you from concentrating appropriately on knowledge gain or physical activities.
• Anxious of success stories: Your LinkedIn feed gets flooded with success stories, achievers, influencers, and co-mates. Those heroic achievements create anxiety and demoralize you to lose confidence. Thus, you want to be realistic for some time.
• Not looking for a job change: You created the account specifically for job search, and now the goal is achieved. You do not wish to upgrade for some time and keep working in the department to learn and progress gradually. Therefore, you want to deactivate the account temporarily⏳.

These were some of the common reasons that provoked people to go ahead and delete their LinkedIn accounts. Let us begin the step-by-step process of temporarily and permanently deleting the LinkedIn account.

Factors to Consider Before Deleting LinkedIn Account

It takes only a few steps to delete the LinkedIn account. But before applying the process, you must thoroughly analyze certain factors.

• LinkedIn offers a chance to reopen the account within 14 days🗓️ of closure by logging in again with the same credentials.
• In any case, once you finally close the account, it will lose the endorsements, recommendations, invitations, your followings, and group membership.
• After closing the account, you cannot connect to your connections by any means.
• LinkedIn will remove your profile page, picture🙍, name altogether, and places, like messages, where the message has your name as the sender will only show “A LinkedIn Member.”
• If you own a LinkedIn group, close it before moving to the steps to close your account.
• If you have LinkedIn’s premium membership or license, cancel it before deleting the account.

Above all, after deleting the account, you won’t stay in touch with regular industrial updates briefed by experts on this portal.

How to Delete a LinkedIn Account: Step-by-Step

Here are the steps you can apply on your computer’s web browser or mobile app to close your LinkedIn account.

#1. Using Your PC to Delete LinkedIn Account Permanently

To delete the account permanently, follow the steps given below.

Step 1. Open the browser on your PC and log in to your LinkedIn account.

Step 2. From the menu bar on the top, hit the “Me” button showing your profile pic.

Step 3. Choose the “Settings & Privacy” option to redirect to another page.

Step 4. You will probably land in the “Account preferences” section, shown in the left column. Scroll down to the “Account management” category, which shows the “Close account” option.

Step 5. Hit the “Close account”🆑 option to reach the next page, which reminds you of losing your connections, recommendations, and endorsements, if you delete this account.

Step 6. Click the “Continue” button, and choose your reason for deleting on the next page.

Step 7. Hit the “Next” button, and type the LinkedIn account password on the next page. You may also discontinue further email communications on the account by selecting the check box below.

Now Click on the “Done” button to delete the account permanently.

#2. Using Your PC to Delete LinkedIn Account Temporarily

To delete the account temporarily, follow the steps given below.

Step 1. Log in to your LinkedIn profile on the PC browser and click the “Me” button.

Step 2. Choose the “Settings & Privacy” option to reach the “Account preferences” section.

Step 3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the “Account management” category.

Step 4. Click the “Hibernate account” option to move to the next page.

Step 5. Choose a reason for hibernating the account, and click the “Next” ⏩button.

Step 6. Type the LinkedIn account password on the next page. The page adds FAQs about the profile name that changes to “A LinkedIn Member” for the connections.

Step 7. Hit the “Hibernate account” button to delete the account temporarily.

Now the account gets temporarily deleted from the platform. You can recover this account whenever required by logging in with the same id and password.

#3. Deleting LinkedIn Account Using Mobile Phone (Temporarily or Permanently)

A similar process is involved if you use your smartphone to delete the account.

Step 1. Log in to the LinkedIn app on your mobile.

Step 2. Go to the top right corner of the application, and click on your profile image.

Step 3. A panel slides to the right, with the “Settings”🔆 option at the bottom.

Step 4. Click on the “Settings” option, and choose “Account preferences.”

Step 5. Under the “Account preferences” section, scroll down the screen to reach the “Account management” part.

Step 6a. To delete the account temporarily, hit the “Hibernate account” option, and choose a reason for deletion.

Step 6b. Click the “Next” 🔚button, and on the next page, type the password, then click the “Hibernate account” button to finish the task.

Step 7a. To permanently delete the account, hit the “Close account” option followed by the “Continue” button on the next page, where you need to choose a suitable reason.

Step 7b. Click the “Next” button, type the password on the next page, and hit the “Done” button to finish the task. Click the check box to unsubscribe from further LinkedIn communication emails.

The above process will delete your LinkedIn account permanently or temporarily, as per your steps.

Backup Your LinkedIn Account Data Before Deactivating

Though you have decided to delete the LinkedIn account, are you not worried about losing crucial data or information such as articles, connections, recommendations, etc?

This platform allows the members to take a backup of their complete or partial data through authentic means. Once you complete the data backup process, LinkedIn sends an email📩 notification to your registered mail account.

Click the link provided in the email notification to get the backup of your LinkedIn account data. But the platform imposes a few rules and regulations while processing for backup. Let’s find out more about them.

Things to Know While Taking Data Backup on LinkedIn

LinkedIn reminds the users of certain applicable conditions about the data backup feature.

• You can request complete data or specific segments like contacts🧾, messages, etc.
• The complete data will be a larger file, and it may take about 24 hours🕛 to generate an email notification regarding the backup download link.
• However, if you request specific data, the portal may mail you the download link in a few minutes.
• Make sure to download the backup before 72 hours of receiving it, or else the link will expire.
• There are categories in the data backup file📁, and the backup will not include segments with no or zero data.
• You won’t receive a backup of dynamic data such as who viewed your profile or people you may know.
• If any of your connections keep privacy settings about not sharing email for downloading, then your backup file will not contain the email of that connection.

The data backup facility is not available for mobile applications. So, you need to use a computer and request LinkedIn for a data backup. As general advice, use your own system for backup LinkedIn account data.

Data Backup of a LinkedIn Account

Asking for a data backup on your LinkedIn account takes easy steps. Follow the given steps.

Step 1. Login to your account, and go to the “Me” icon on the top bar.

Step 2. From the given options, click on “Settings & Privacy.”

Step 3. Now choose the “Data Privacy” option from the “Settings” column in the left panel.

Step 4. The top section is, “How LinkedIn uses your data.” Click on “Get a copy of your data.”

Step 5. Select the large data file for the entire data backup or choose particular segments.

Step 6. Now hit the “Request archive” button.

Step 7. You will receive a link on your registered mail in some time.

Click on the given link to download the data backup of your LinkedIn account.

For How Long Does the Search Engines Take to Forget Your LinkedIn Account Details

If you think your LinkedIn account carries some confidential or controversial information, and by deleting it, all such details will get vanished. Then, you need to be corrected here.

Searching🔍 a deleted profile on Google or any other search engine may not yield results. But the information would still be in the cache memory and may take a long time to complete removal.

A copy of data gets created because search engine algorithms regularly crawl and index the website to retrieve live data. They keep detailed information for better search results with personalized experience and confer legalities.

If your LinkedIn profile is backlinked on any other website, then the profile data may remain saved with the old link. So, it is hard to calculate the exact time when the information completely deletes from the search engine servers.

My Take: Should You Delete Your LinkedIn Account

LinkedIn is a globally recognized professional networking platform. There are big brands💲, marketers, intellectuals, hiring managers, and experienced workers who show their active presence and share valuable information. Hence, there are multiple reasons to stay on the platform, and there may be better ways to eliminate your problem than deleting it.

If unregulated emails and notifications are your concerns, then try to customize them through “Communication Settings” You may also check the privacy settings, and if an individual is bothering you, then block that profile and report🚫 it.

A more suitable option than deleting the account permanently is to take a break and hibernate or deactivate it for some time. This way, you can return to the platform and leverage the benefits without trying to delete the profile and followers.

You may also explore how to hide LinkedIn profile and put it on stealth mode.