You search your own name the night before an interview and there you are, twice. One profile is current. The other shows a job you left long ago, a photo from another decade and a handful of connections you had forgotten about. Nobody sets out to own two LinkedIn accounts, yet it happens all the time, and it is easy to fix as long as you do things in the right order.
How a second account appears without you noticing
Almost always it starts with an email address. You signed up as a student with a university address, graduated, lost that mailbox, and later signed up again with a personal one. Or an employer asked you to join with your work address, and the account stayed behind when you left.
The other common route is the login method. You registered once with an email and a password, then at some later point used a quick sign-in button tied to a different address, and the site treated you as a new person. It was not wrong. From its point of view, two addresses are two people.
Then there is the profile made in an afternoon, long ago, because a lecturer or a manager said you should have one. You wrote a headline, added a few classmates and never returned. That account falls out of memory until someone else finds it for you.
What the stale profile costs you
The plain risk is that a recruiter lands on the wrong one. Search results do not sort by which profile you care about. Someone who types your name and a city may get the old account first, see a junior job with no end date, and conclude that you have done nothing in particular since.
Your network splits, too. Former colleagues who connected with the old account are not connected with the one you use, so they never see your updates and your name does not come to mind when a role opens on their team.
And then the messages. Anything sent to the old profile lands in an inbox nobody reads. An invitation to talk about a job may be sitting there right now, which is the argument that should get you moving this week.
A duplicate account is not embarrassing. An unanswered recruiter message on a profile you forgot about is expensive.
Choose the account to keep before touching anything
The instinct is to keep the newer profile, because it looks better. Look at what cannot be rebuilt instead. Text can be retyped in an evening. A network cannot.
Compare the two on these points:
- Connections. Which account holds more of the people you would actually want to reach?
- Recommendations. Other people wrote them, on their own time. You cannot produce them again on demand.
- History. Posts, comments, the age of the account, conversations you may need to reread one day.
- The sign-in address. One of the two depends on an address you control today and will still control after your next change of employer.
Often the answer is uncomfortable: the old, unflattering account has the network and the recommendations, and the new one has the polish. In that case keep the old one and move the polish across. Rewriting a summary costs you an hour. Asking several former managers to write for you again costs goodwill.
Whichever you keep, attach it to a personal email address. A work address is how the next duplicate is born.
What a merge moves, and what it leaves behind
At the time of writing, LinkedIn offers a way to merge duplicate accounts, and it is worth looking at before you think about closing anything. The reason is your connections: a merge moves the connections from the duplicate to the account you keep.
That is close to everything it does. Profile content is not carried over. Neither are recommendations, endorsements or group memberships. So a merge is not a blend of two profiles into a better one. It is a transfer of your network, after which only the account you chose is left.
There are also limits on which accounts can be merged, so not every pair qualifies. I am not describing any steps here, and that is deliberate: the product changes, and an out-of-date walkthrough does more harm than none at all. Check the current help page, read the conditions, and only then decide.
If a merge is not open to you, closing the duplicate is the fallback. Assume that whatever sits on that account, network included, goes with it, and invite the people who matter from the account you are keeping before you close the other.
What to copy by hand first
Do this before the merge, not after. Once the duplicate is gone, whatever did not travel no longer exists.
- The profile text. Copy the summary, each job description, education entries, certifications, projects and volunteering into a plain document. Old descriptions often hold details you have since forgotten: a tool, the size of a team, a client name.
- Recommendations. Copy the wording and note who wrote each one and the role they held at the time. You may want to ask a few of them to write again on the account you keep, and showing people their own earlier text turns that into an easy favour.
- Groups. List the ones that are still useful so you can rejoin them. Be honest, most of them you will not miss.
- Messages. Read the duplicate's inbox from top to bottom. Reply to anything still alive, and tell those people where to find you now.
If you want the whole profile saved in one pass before it disappears, a LinkedIn-to-CV tool such as Postulit turns a profile into a CV document, which doubles as an archive of the old wording.
When you cannot get into the old account
This is the usual snag. The duplicate depends on a university or employer address that no longer exists, so the reset email goes nowhere.
Try the obvious first. Some universities keep alumni addresses alive or forward them, and a former employer's IT desk will sometimes forward a single message to someone who asks politely. If one email can reach you at that address, there is a fair chance you can recover the account on your own.
If that fails, the route at the time of writing is LinkedIn's support. Keep at hand anything that shows both accounts are yours, and be patient with it. Losing access for other reasons, a restriction or a break-in, is a different problem with its own article on this blog, and it has little to do with a simple lost address.
The check afterwards
Let some time pass, then search your own name while signed out, or from a private browsing window. Signed in, what you see is not necessarily what a stranger sees.
You are looking for a single profile. If the old one still shows up in a search engine for a while, that is usually a stored result lagging behind and not a failed merge. Open the link and see whether the page still exists. People who share your name will appear too, which is a separate problem covered elsewhere on this blog, as is the profile address worth tidying once only one account remains. Then fix whatever still points at the old profile: your CV, your email signature, a personal site.
So, the order. Choose the account that holds your network and your recommendations. Copy everything else off the other one. Read the current help page, merge if the conditions allow it, close if they do not. Then search your name signed out and fix every link that led to the wrong you. One address, one account, and the matter is closed.