Experienced managers and executives typically have a range of roles and accomplishments to draw from. Recently I coached a senior sales executive who had achieved major sales milestones but also managed sales teams and also designed and implemented sales processes.
Experienced managers and executives typically have a range of roles and accomplishments to draw from. Recently I coached a senior sales executive who had achieved major sales milestones but also managed sales teams and also designed and implemented sales processes. Is she an individual contributor, a manager or an innovator/ leader? Clearly, she’s all three but what she chooses to highlight is going to determine how prospective employers envision her at their companies and therefore determine the roles she’ll be offered. Because she hasn’t positioned herself proactively, she has recently been relegated to a string of individual contributor roles and hasn’t felt challenged or rewarded accordingly.
Use the very top of your resume as your positioning statement. If you want to be an individual contributor, highlight your sales results (or other bottom line metric). If you want to be a manager, highlight number of direct reports, size of teams, and budget overseen. If you want to be an executive, growth and profitability are key metrics, as are examples of innovation or visionary thinking.
Frame your networking pitch around the position you want. Give examples that correlate with the role you wish to play – use the resume highlights from above as your guide. If a target company is focused on your individual contributions and you want to manage or lead, then you need to shift the conversation or you need to realize that their target role does not match your needs and move on.
Positioning is also for the happily employed, not just for jobseekers. To proactively manage your career – get assigned the plum projects, get promoted to roles you want, get compensated according to your value – you need to position yourself at your target level. There are no one-size-fits-all career paths. Even similar job functions will have different paths at different companies. So you need to understand how it works where you are and navigate accordingly.
Is Your Job Search Flexible or Just Unfocused?
As a recruiter, I’ve seen lack of flexibility on the recruiting side with employers clinging to every last detail in their ideal spec while perfectly good candidates get overlooked. As a career coach, I see jobseekers prematurely dismissing possible targets waiting for that perfect job. It’s true that you want to be focused in your job search (otherwise you dilute your efforts and come across as scattered and possibly desperate).
5 Questions to Test If Your Resume Is Recruiter-Proof
After recruiting in search and in-house for over ten years, I have read thousands of resumes. Due to sheer volume of resumes received and all the other things that vie for the recruiter’s attention in the hiring process – scheduling, interviewing, networking, reference checks, client debriefs, and more – the resume review process is ruthlessly quick.
How Do You Score On Employers’ Top Five Desired Skills?
Even if you are happily employed, work environments and priorities change. You want to make sure that you are not getting complacent and allowing your skills to rust. The above five skills are always valued, but the standards by which they are measured change over your career. Maybe you got to where you are now because of superior analytical skills and despite below average communication skills, but now you are a manager.
