I am the Queen Bee.
Not by choice. Not on purpose. And definitely not because I asked for it.
But that’s definitely what LinkedIn decided was my title.
(I have the screenshot to prove it.)
Here’s what happened: I was working with a client on her Experience section and wanted to test something in the job title field on my own profile. So I added a test entry, poked around, got the data I needed, and deleted it.
Done. Or so I thought.
The next morning, I opened LinkedIn and there it was. “Queen Bee at Love Your LinkedIn Profile.” Sitting right under my name, right below my banner that reads “LinkedIn isn’t dead. But your profile is probably on life support.”
The woman who has spent years telling you to fix your headline had a headline that read “Queen Bee.” Memorable? Probably. Effective? For all the wrong reasons.
And the banner above it was roasting her for it.
Can LinkedIn Change Your Headline Without You Knowing?
Apparently so. And here’s how it happens.
LinkedIn pulls your headline from your most recent Experience entry by default. If you’ve manually written your headline, adding a new Experience entry can override it.
(Which was news to me.)
And if you delete that entry afterward? LinkedIn doesn’t always revert to what you had before.
(Also news to me. But in my case, it might have also been divine providence.)
Your headline is the single most visible line on your entire LinkedIn profile. It appears in search results, connection requests, comments, and every single place your name shows up on the platform.
And LinkedIn treats it like an auto-fill field.
Heavy sigh.
Because Irony Isn’t Dead
After recovering from the horror of a headline that completely violates every one of my tenets on what makes a great LinkedIn headline, I couldn’t stop laughing.
Because first of all, I AM the Queen Bee over here at LYLIP.
breaks arm patting self on back
And second, I was just lamenting last week that I hated my headline, and now I have no idea what it said before LinkedIn overwrote it. I mean, I could probably dig through pages and pages of brainstorming notes to find it.
Maybe.
(Let’s be honest, here. That’s never happening.)
So now I get to start from (almost) scratch.
First order of business: I immediately added an old favorite: “Expert motivator (with swear words).”
(It’s accurate. Ask anyone.)
And now I have to figure out the rest. But for now, I’ve added a couple of boring stand-bys.
What This Means for Your LinkedIn Headline
If you’ve recently added a new role, a test entry, or a side project to your Experience section and then deleted it, go check your headline. Right now. Because LinkedIn may have quietly replaced whatever you wrote with whatever it pulled from that entry.
And unlike your resume, LinkedIn doesn’t keep versions. There’s no “undo.” There’s no draft history. If it overwrote your headline, your old one is gone.
Not cool, LinkedIn. Not cool.
Meanwhile, new goal unlocked: updating my headline again before you read this post.
(Or not.)
Either way, we have the screenshot to prove that even the expert gets had by LinkedIn. It’s not like they announce their changes and update their manuals.