Craft · Apr 8, 2026 · 7 min
Why Your LinkedIn Headline Is Costing You $40,000
A repositioning case study. The same person, two headlines, twelve weeks. The cost of a vague summary is not aesthetic. It is the gap between the offers you’re getting and the offers your work would actually warrant.
Last fall, I rewrote a single client’s LinkedIn headline. Same person, same job, same twelve months of work history. New language. Twelve weeks later, she had three offers in her inbox — the lowest of which was $40k above what her old headline had been attracting.
What changed
Her old headline was a job title. Her new headline was a position. The difference is roughly the difference between describing yourself as a runner and describing yourself as the woman who never stopped running. One is data. The other is an invitation.
- Stop leading with the job title. Lead with the verb.
- Replace adjectives with proof. “Senior” is filler; a number isn’t.
- Write to the room you want to walk into, not the room you’re leaving.
- Read it out loud. If it sounds like a résumé, rewrite it.