LinkedIn Profile vs Resume: About Section Before and After

I want you to picture a woman named Celeste, 26 years in regulatory affairs at a pharmaceutical company, maybe that you’ve heard of. She was the person in the building who knew how to get a drug past the FDA, which is not a small thing to be the person for, right? She left 18 months ago, and now she’s consulting mostly for small biotechs who have one shot at a submission, and nobody on staff who’s ever done it before. She is, and I don’t say this lightly, exactly the person these companies need.

So, founder of one of these companies, a woman with a submission due in the spring and a board breathing down her neck, gets the last name from a friend. She does what you do: she looks her up, she lands on her LinkedIn profile, and here’s what she reads, the first thing right under the name: “Senior regulatory affairs executive, strategic leader with 26 plus years of experience, proven track record of success in global submissions,” and she thinks, “Okay, she’s looking for a job,” and closes the profile.

Celeste is not looking for a job. Celeste would love to have this opportunity, and she’d be insulted if you told her that’s the only thing her profile says, right? But that is what her profile says because it was written for somebody who was going to hire her, and the woman reading it wasn’t hiring; she was buying. Buying. Those are two completely different documents.

I’m Karen Yankovich. This is Good Girls Get Rich, and today we’re going to listen to Celeste’s profile. We’re not going to look at it. We’re going to listen to it because the problem with it is one that you can hear.

So we’ve been doing a little bit of a run here. If you’ve been with me for the last few weeks, let me catch you up because this one builds on it. And if you’re new, this stands on itself; this is enough to go on. A few weeks ago, I put you in the buyer’s chair, and we talked about why clients hire someone less qualified than you. Not because she’s better, but because the buyer could tell what she was for in about four seconds, and with you, she couldn’t.

And then the next week, we built your sentence in the room that you’re not in: “She’s who you call when…” And then the thing: if you did that work, you have a sentence now. So hooray, celebrating you.

So here’s where that leaves you: you’ve got one sentence. Maybe you even put it on your headline—which great, that’s where it goes—and a stranger reads it, and for the first time in a long time, she gets it. She clicks. She’s in. She’s on your profile now, and she’s scrolling.

And this is the part that nobody warns you about: everything below that sentence was written years ago by a different version of you for a different reader for a completely different reason. The sentence says, “I’m the one you call,” and the rest of the page says, “I’m available for the right opportunity.” So she doesn’t call. She’s confused, and confused people do nothing. They close the tab. They go back to the friend who recommended you and say, “Oh, is she still consulting? Does it look like she was looking for a job?”

That’s the resume problem. That’s what happens when your profile is written like a resume. A resume is all about who you used to be. And I want to be careful here because I’m not telling you that your profile is bad. Most of the profiles I see from women at your level are really good resumes, all about who you used to be, thorough, accurate, even impressive. I could hire off of them tomorrow, but that’s the problem: I’m not hiring, I’m buying. So they work beautifully for somebody who doesn’t exist anymore.

So here’s why I’m doing this episode the way I’m doing it. Usually, when somebody teaches you about your LinkedIn profile, you need to be looking at it. But this is a podcast, so I can’t say, “Scroll here, click there, see this box,” because you’re in the car or you’re walking your dog, and you’re thinking, “I’ll do this later,” and then later never comes. Not today, my friend.

Today you don’t need to look at anything because the thing that makes a profile read like a resume is not a layout problem. It’s a language problem. It’s the words, and words you can hear. So I’m going to read Celeste’s profile to you out loud, as written, and then I’m going to tell you what you just heard, and I’m going to read you the rewrite, and I promise you’ll hear the difference before I even explain it. And then after that, you’re going to be able to do this to your own profile tonight, tomorrow, two o’clock in the morning, without me in about 10 minutes by ear.

But one thing before I start: just so you know, Celeste is not a real person. She’s a compilation of three or four women that I’ve worked with, all stitched together. I’ve changed the details to protect the innocent and to protect the guilty. So if you’re sitting there thinking, “Wait, that’s me,” it’s not you. But if it sounds like you, that’s kind of the point.

All right. So here we go. Here’s Celeste’s about section—this is that big box under the headline. And by the way, it used to be called a summary, and a summary is boring. It’s like Cliff Notes, and it’s boring. But “about” is interesting. It’s juicy. If you know anything about about sections on your website or about pages, it’s often the most visited page on your site because we’re nosy. We want to know more about the people behind the website. We want to know more about you.

Okay, so now that it’s called the about section, it really needs to be the story. So I’m going to read it exactly the way it sits on her profile initially. Don’t do anything; just listen to how it sounds:

“Celeste is a results-driven senior regulatory affairs executive with over 26 years’ experience leading global regulatory strategy in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. She has a proven track record of success managing complex submissions across multiple therapeutic areas, including oncology, immunology, and rare disease. Throughout her career, Celeste has been responsible for building and leading high-performing cross-functional teams, developing regulatory strategies for product lifecycle management, and serving as the primary liaison with health authorities, including the FDA, EMA, and PMDA. She has successfully led the submission and approval of 14 new drug applications and has extensive experience in advisory committee preparation. Prior to launching her consulting practice, Celeste served as vice president of global regulatory affairs, where she was responsible for a team of 40 and an annual budget of $12 million. She holds a master of science in pharmacology and is a member of the Regulatory Affairs Professional Society. Celeste is passionate about mentoring the next generation of regulatory professionals and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, cooking, and spending time with her family.”

Okay, so how’d that feel? If you were driving, I hope you didn’t fall asleep. Because here’s what I want to point out before we take it apart: every word of that is true. Every word of it is impressive. Fourteen NDAs, a team of 40. If you handed me that on paper in a job interview, I’d be like, “Ooh, this is it!” I’d be sitting up straighter. There’s nothing wrong with Celeste’s career, and still you drifted. I know you did because it was hard for me to read it, and I wrote it. I was drifting reading it somewhere around product lifecycle management. You started thinking about what you’re making for dinner tonight.

So let’s think about that founder, the woman with the submission due in the spring. She’s not drifting on her couch; she’s panicking at her desk, and she landed on that paragraph looking for one thing: Can this woman get my drug across the line? And she read four paragraphs about Celeste and never found the answer to that, because that whole about section is about Celeste. It is not in any sentence, in any way, shape, or form, about the woman with the submission.

And I want you to notice something else: Did you hear the word “you” in there even once? No, because resumes don’t say “you.” A resume isn’t talking to anybody; it’s being submitted, it’s being filed.

It goes in a stack, and somebody with a checklist goes through the stack. That’s what it’s built for, and that’s fine when that’s what’s happening, but nobody’s going through a stack when they land on your LinkedIn profile. There’s one woman with one problem, and she’s talking to you. She’s asking, she’s begging: Are you the one? And Celeste’s profile was answering questions nobody asked.

So let me tell you what you heard. There are six things in that about section that gave it away as a resume, and every single one of them is about something you can hear. You don’t need to see the page; you need to listen for these:

• Number one: It’s in the third person. “Celeste is a results-driven executive. Celeste is… she has… her career.” Who is talking? Celeste wrote this. She wrote it about herself in the third person, like somebody else was introducing her at an awards dinner. And I get why—people ask me this all the time. Third person feels more professional, feels like it has more authority (“Somebody else is saying this about me, so it must be true”). But think about what it does to the reader: she came to your page to meet you, and instead she got a press release. First person is not less professional; first person is a person (“I spent 26 years getting drugs across the finish line at the FDA”). That’s what she wanted to hear.

• Number two: The adjective stack. “Results-driven, strategic, proven, high-performing, extensive, successful, passionate.” I want you to try something: say “results-driven” out loud right now wherever you are. Go ahead. Now tell me what it means. It doesn’t mean anything! It’s a word that exists to be scanned by software. Someone told us 15 years ago that recruiters search for these kinds of things, and maybe they did, so we all stuffed our profiles with them like we were stuffing a turkey. But a human being reads “results-driven” and her eyes just roll back behind her head. There is nothing to hold on to. And here’s the thing that really should bother you: every other person in your field has the exact same seven adjectives. So the words that were supposed to make you stand out are the words that make you identical. You know what you can hear instead of an adjective? A number, a name, a thing that happened. “14 NDAs” is worth more than every adjective in that paragraph put together, and it was buried in the second paragraph where nobody barely even heard it.

• Number three: “Responsible for…” “Responsible for building and leading high-performing teams… responsible for a team of 40 and an annual budget…” “Responsible” is job description language. It’s what gets pasted into the posting before you were hired. It describes a seat, not a person. You could be responsible for something and be terrible at it. “Responsible” just tells me it was on your plate; it doesn’t tell me if you did anything or if you were any good at it. And I’ll tell you what it’s written for: it’s written for the hiring manager comparing your old job to the open one (“Responsible for a budget this size? Check. A team this size? Check.”). It’s a checklist reader, and the founder with a spring deadline does not have a checklist; she has a problem. And “responsible for” never touches the problem.

• Number four: Told in reverse. “26 years experience, then the career, then prior to launching her consulting practice, then the degree, then the hobbies.” That’s resume order: most senior thing first, walking backwards through time, education at the bottom, personal interests in the last line so you seem human. We all learned that format. It’s a good format for a resume, but notice what it does to the one thing the founder actually came for: Celeste’s consulting practice—the thing she does now, the thing the founder wants to buy—shows up as a subordinate clause (“Prior to launching her consulting practice…”). It’s not even its own sentence.

• The entire reason the reader is on the page gets a few words on the way to the VP title. A magnet—which is what you want—runs the other direction: it starts with the reader’s problem right now, today, and the career shows up later as the reason you’re the one who can solve it. The past is evidence; it’s not the headline.

• Number five: The reader isn’t in it. I said this a minute ago, but I want to say it properly because this is a big one: there’s no “you” in Celeste’s about section—not one. She’s writing in a room about herself. So think about this with your own about section tonight: count the “you”s. If the number is zero, you’ve written a resume, and I don’t care how amazing it is, because the reader needs to see herself in those first couple lines, not find you—find herself. If you’re a biotech founder with a submission due and nobody on staff who’s been through one, and your profile says, “That’s who I work with,” she reads that and goes, “Oh my God, that’s me!” And I keep reading now because every credential after that is like, “Yes, that’s what I want. She’s the one who’s going to help me,” instead of just someone who had a great career. Makes sense?

• Number six: The hobby line. “In her free time, she enjoys hiking, cooking, and spending time with her family.” Listen, I have no problem with hiking, but that line is there for one reason: because somebody told you to be relatable, probably to a hiring committee. On a magnet, it’s dead air. The founder does not care if you hike; she cares that you can get her through an advisory committee without her falling apart. So, if you want to be a person on your profile—and you should, because you want to connect human to human here—you want to be a person about the work. Tell her what you’ve seen go wrong. Tell her the thing that still makes you mad. That’s what relatable is. Hiking is just filler.

So those are the six: third person, the adjective stack, “responsible for,” told in reverse, no “you,” and the hobby line. And here’s what they all have in common: every one of them is written for somebody who’s comparing you to a job description. Not one of them is written for somebody who’s about to pick up the phone and buy something from you. A resume is written for somebody deciding whether they want to hire you; a magnet is written for somebody deciding whether or not to call you.

All right, so let me read you the next one. Same Celeste, same 26 years, same 14 NDAs. I didn’t change or add a single accomplishment; I just wrote this one for the woman at the desk instead of the stack at the desk:

“If you’re running a small biotech and you’ve got a submission due that the whole company is riding on, and nobody on your team has actually been through one, I’m who you call. I spent 26 years inside big pharma regulatory affairs—the last nine as VP—and I’ve taken 14 new drug applications all the way through: oncology, immunology, rare diseases. I’ve sat across from the FDA more times than I can count, and I’ve prepped teams for advisory committees that would have gone sideways if we hadn’t rehearsed the hard questions out loud first. Here’s what I know from the other side of the table: most submissions that get delayed don’t fail on the science; they fail on a question nobody thought to ask eight months earlier. And by the time it surfaces, there’s no time left to answer it. That’s the thing I’m great at catching. I’ve seen the question before; you haven’t, and you shouldn’t have to learn it the expensive way. I work with founders and their teams from strategy through the day the decision letter lands. If that’s where you are, send me a message and tell me when it’s due. I’ll tell you honestly whether you’re ready.”

Now you heard that, right? You didn’t need me to explain this; you felt the difference in your body somewhere around the first sentence or two. And let me point out a few things anyway because I want you to be able to do this yourself:

• The first sentence is about her, the reader. “If you’re running a small biotech and you’ve got a submission due…” Celeste doesn’t show up till the end of that sentence, and when she does, it’s the answer: “I’m who you call.” That’s the sentence from two weeks ago, by the way. That’s your one sentence, and this is where it lives: it’s the first line of your about section, it’s the thing in the headline, and it’s what your friend says in the room—same word in all these different places.

• Second paragraph: Now your career shows up—26 years, nine as VP, 14 NDAs—all the same facts as the resume version. But listen to where they are now: they’re after the reader already knows this is for her, so they’re not a brag. They’re a reason that you can exhale; they’re a reason you can relax about this.

• Third paragraph: This is the one most people skip, and it’s the most important one. “Here’s what I know from the other side of the table…” This is the gold. That’s Celeste’s point of view—not just what she did, but what she’s seen, what she believes, the thing that still gets her a person and not a seat. It’s the paragraph that makes the founder think, “She’s seen my exact nightmare and she’s not scared of it.” That’s the paragraph your hobby line was pretending to be.

• And that last line: it tells the reader exactly what to do (“Send me a message. Tell me when it’s due.”). The resume version ended with hiking; this one ends with a door open.

One more thing I want you to notice, and then we’re going to move on: the resume version was four paragraphs of fog. This one is four paragraphs too, but you could repeat half of it back to me right now. A magnet is not longer; it’s just not wasted.

And I want to say this to the woman who’s thinking, “That’s fine for Celeste; she’s got a clean story—regulatory affairs, 14 NDAs. It’s easy to be specific when your work has numbers in it.” I hear that, but I am telling you, my team and I have written these for leadership coaches, for the woman going after her next board seat, for the HR consultant whose results are hard to count—it works every time for one reason: you’re not describing yourself; you’re describing the day somebody needs you, and everybody has that day. You just have to say what it looks like.

Okay, so this is the big one: the about section is the big one, and if you only fix that, you’ve fixed most of your LinkedIn profile. But there are two more places that the resume sneaks in, and I can do both of them fast, the same way. So listen to the before and listen to the after.

Let’s talk about the headline—this is the line under your name, and it’s the only part of your profile that travels with you. It shows up next to every comment you make, every post you make, and in somebody’s search results. Most people don’t see your about section, but everybody sees your headline, and hopefully then they click on it to see your about section.

• The before of Celeste: “Senior regulatory affairs executive | strategic leader | 26 plus years | global submissions | FDA, EMA, PMDA | consultant.” You hear those little bars, those vertical lines? I can hear them, and I’m not even looking. That’s six job posting keywords in a row with a fence in between them. It reads like the tags on a blog post or hashtags, and that last word, “consultant,” is doing all the work and standing at the very end, and that probably doesn’t even get seen on most of them because it gets cut off on mobile.

• The after: “I get first-time biotech submissions through the FDA | 14 NDAs, 26 years inside big pharma, now on your side of the table.” One sentence about her, one sentence of proof, no bars, and “I get” is a verb. Headlines should have a verb in them because a verb is a person doing something, whereas a title is a seat somebody sat in. So redo your headline next.

Next, your experience section. This is the section where the resume really lives because this is the section that literally is a resume: dates, titles, companies, bullet points. And I’m not going to tell you to delete it, because that history is real and it matters, and people do scroll down to check that it’s legit—they look to see, “Hey, is this the person I used to work with at Verizon 20 years ago?”

• How Celeste had her current role written (the before): “Principal Consultant, Celeste Wigfield Consulting LLC, March 2025 to Present. Providing regulatory strategy and submission support to emerging biotechnology companies. Services include regulatory pathway assessment, agency meeting preparation, and submission project management.” That is a brochure written in a brochure voice for a reader who’s comparing vendors on a spreadsheet, not one who wants to write a check.

• The after: “I work with small biotechs that have one shot at submission and a team that’s never done one. Usually, I come in six to nine months out, find the question nobody’s asked yet, and I get it answered before the agency asks it. Most recently: two rare disease NDAs and one that we pulled back from the edge three weeks before filing.” It’s the same information, but now it’s a story with a shape, and it ends with the most recent thing that happened—which is what the founder wants to know anyway, not what you offer, but what you did.

So here’s the rule for jobs underneath it—the VP role, the director role, all the things before: they can stay kind of in resume voice. Honestly, nobody’s buying your 2014 job; they’re glancing at it to confirm you’re real. What you’re using that for is to build the story of how you got to where you are today. If in 2014 what you did was completely different, just pull from that job what’s relevant to the job you have now, because you want to build why you’re qualified for what you do today. One line each: What was the one thing you did there that’s relevant to what you do now? You do not have to put everything you did there; nobody cares that you used Word and Excel 25 years ago. Spend your important words on the top one; the rest is kind of just the explanation.

So that’s it: three reads—your about section, your headline, and the top of your experience section. All three had the same problems, and all three got the same medicine: who’s reading this, and what does she need to hear in the first line?

And I’m going to tell you something that happens when you do this that nobody expects: you get found more, not just understood better. Found because the words a founder types into Google at 11 o’clock at night are not “results-driven regulatory executive”—she types in “FDA submission help small biotech,” and when your profile finally says what she’s searching for, it starts showing up for her. I’ve had clients tell me their LinkedIn climbed to the second result on Google for their own name right under their website after they rewrote it this way. One told me it went to number one and started getting asked onto retreats and panels she’d never pitched. This isn’t a trick; it’s what happens when this page finally says what you do using the words people use to look for it.

And I hear you—I hear you all across the interwebs, because I’ve heard every one of these in coaching calls. So let me just take them one by one:

• “But Karen, I might want a job someday. I might want a job now if somebody wants to make me an offer. I might take it.” Maybe you will. A lot of the women I work with are keeping that door open—a fractional role, a board seat, something corporate that comes along and is too good to pass up. And you think the resume version protects that? It doesn’t. Here’s what actually happens: the recruiter who’s going to bring you the board seat is not scanning your about section for keywords; she already knows who you are, and she got your name from somebody. She’s reading your profile to find out if you’re interesting. And “results-driven strategic leader” is the least interesting thing a person can be. The magnet version makes you more hireable, not less, because it makes you a specific person with a point of view, and that’s who gets the call for those interesting roles. The resume gets you the roles that go to a stack.

• “But Karen, it sounds like I’m selling.” First of all, do you have a big red cross on the front of your building? If not, it’s okay that people know you’re a for-profit business. But read Celeste’s rewrite again in your head: Is there a pitch in there? There’s a sentence about who she works with, a few facts, something she believes in, and an open door. That’s not selling; that’s being clear. The thing that feels like she’s selling to you is the first person. You’ve been trained for 30 years that talking about yourself in your own voice is unseemly. It’s not! It’s what you’d do if she called you on the phone. You wouldn’t say—I can’t even say it with a straight face—you wouldn’t say on the phone, “Celeste is a results-driven executive.” You’d say, “So what’s going on, and what do you need?” Write that, please. Write that.

• “But Karen, my work doesn’t have numbers.” I said this earlier, and I’ll say it again because it’s the one that stops most women: If your results don’t count, describe the day. Describe the day somebody needed you. The leadership coach doesn’t have 14 NDAs, but she has the week after the reorg when your two best people are updating their resumes. That’s as specific as a number—more honestly, because the reader can see it happening.

• “But Karen, I’ve had this profile for 10 years, and people have hired me off it.” They have, and they would have hired you faster and paid you more and sent you two friends if they’d understood what you did in four seconds instead of four paragraphs. I’m not saying your profile has never worked; I’m saying you have no idea how many women close the tab. You only ever hear from the ones who didn’t.

• “But Karen, it’s on my to-do list. I promise, I’ll do it when the time is right.” No, no, no, no, no, my friend. Please, please do the about section tonight. Do it badly: first person, start with her, say the one sentence, put the facts second, say one thing you believe, open the door. Twenty minutes, and it will already be better than the one that’s up there now, because the one up there now is talking to nobody. You can make it beautiful next week; tonight, just make it a person.

But I’ll tell you what I would do if I were you tonight, before you change a single word: I want you to open your LinkedIn profile on your phone and go to the about section, and then hit record on the voice memo app on your phone and read it out loud—the whole thing, exactly as it’s written—and then play it back. That’s it. I’m not telling you to fix it; I’m telling you to hear it, because most women have never once heard their own profile out loud. And I promise you, somewhere in that second paragraph, you’re going to be like, “Oof,” and that wince is the whole episode. You’ll know exactly which tells are in there; you don’t need me to point it out anymore—you heard it. You’ve heard me talk about this, and then you’re going to fix it because you’re not going to be able to stand it. So that’s just what happens.

So here’s what I want to leave you with: Celeste didn’t need a new career. She didn’t need more credentials or a better photo or a bigger network. She had everything. She had just written her profile for the wrong reader—for a stack of resumes instead of for a woman with a deadline and her finger on her submit button on her credit card. And the second she turned the page around and talked to that woman, that same 26 years started doing a completely different job.

A resume is written for someone deciding whether to hire you; a magnet is written for somebody deciding whether to call you. And once that page is finally saying what you do in real words a real person would use, the next question is how to get that page in front of people who’ve never heard of you, the ones who aren’t going to get your name from a friend.

That is what my free masterclass is about. It’s called Borrow the Stage. It’s on demand, and it’s at karenyankovich.com/bts. That’s BTS for Borrow the Stage. karenyankovich.com/bts. Check it out—it’s on demand and it’s free.

But for now, go read your profile out loud, and I’ll see you back here next week.