Why Even a Great Resume Won’t Get You Interviews as an Experienced Executive

  The Executive Job Search Has Changed A successful career can create an unexpected problem when it is time to look for the next opportunity. A Director, Vice President, or C-suite executive may have spent fifteen or twenty years building teams, increasing revenue, improving operations, navigating difficult transformations, managing multimillion-dollar budgets, and making decisions that materially affected an organization. Yet when that same leader enters the job market, the process can suddenly feel unfamiliar. Applications go unanswered. Recruiters who once seemed interested become quiet. LinkedIn activity produces conversations but few serious opportunities. Positions that appear to be an excellent fit generate little response. For many senior leaders, the first reaction is to assume something is wrong with their experience. More often, the problem is that the executive job search strategy being used no longer matches the level at which they are competing. That matter...

There is an exasperating situation that many experienced executives face when they are looking for a job. On paper, they seem to have all the experience, titles and accomplishments that an employer would want: 15-20 years of experience, senior leadership titles, responsibility for large teams, major transformation projects, revenue growth, operational improvements, a record of solving tough business problems. But once they have written a new resume and applied for jobs at the senior level, the interview requests are not as frequent as they would hope. If you’ve spent years building a successful career, this can be hard to wrap your head around. The natural assumption is there’s something wrong with the resume. The executive rewrites the summary, changes the format, adds more achievements, tweaks keywords and starts another round of applications. If the response is still limited, the resume is again revised. But in many cases, the resume is just one part of the problem. The execut...