One of my senior clients came to me after several years in a leadership role. He had a strong international background, significant responsibilities, and the kind of experience that should have made him more than competitive for Director opportunities.
Yet he was applying for different roles, registering a very low response from the market.
Why is that? Recruiters were interpreting his experience way differently from what he thought.
A senior career is quite difficult to summarise
When you have been working for 15, 20 or 25 years, you had: different roles, responsibilities, teams reporting to you, problems you faced, business results you influenced directly, and often experience in multiple companies and countries.
All of those jobs feel equally important to you, so it becomes incredibly difficult to decide what should actually define you now, and what it's time to let go.
Your CV should not be a summary of everything you have done in your career, even if you are proud of it: you have to turn it into a careful selection of the experience and results that make sense for the role you want next.
When that story becomes clear, recruiters are more likely to see where you fit, headhunters start reaching out, and applications finally get a response. In the end, if you want to move to another country, enter a different industry, or target positions with more strategic responsibility, you can't assume recruiters will connect the dots for you.
You have to help them understand the link between your past experience and the problems they need you to solve right now.
The first thing we changed was not his CV, but the narrative leading to it
We started by looking at his experience differently.
Instead of trying to make everything sound fancier (like AI does), we became more selective and intentional, so his career narrative could get interpreted for what it was: evidence that he was more than ready for that new opportunity.
Like many experienced professionals, he also found it uncomfortable to “brag” about his achievements.
The bigger problem was that some of his strongest career stories were being described in a very operational way.
Important context was missing: the clients involved, the emergencies and problems he found in every single job, the decisions he had made, the money he had saved the company and the proactive steps he had taken to create structure, grow the business and open new markets (in multinationals, start-ups, scale ups, as he was living in very different countries).
I gave him a structure to work from and started asking the uncomfortable questions that helped us open those stories up.
Suddenly, creativity was no longer a buzzword on a CV: we could demonstrate it.
His commercial judgement became visible. So did the financial impact of his decisions, the opportunities he had created and the way he had proactively solved problems, going above and beyond, instead of simply executing what was expected of him.
He told me he was surprised by how much valuable information we had been able to bring back to life, and by how much stronger the case for his expertise and potential had become.
After only a few applications with the new positioning, he was already progressing through the selection process for a CEO role at a growing company.
That is the difference between making a CV sound “more senior” and actually showing the evidence that you have been operating at that level.
We also stopped treating every job opportunity in the same way
Another change was moving away from the idea that a job search is simply sending as many applications as possible and waiting passively.
We looked at the market more strategically, focusing on roles/ countries/ industries/ causes aligned with his experience and built a networking plan targeting the right people, agencies, and events.
This is another big pain for senior professionals: after years of being approached by recruiters, referred internally, or moving through their networks, they suddenly find themselves needing to actively create opportunities after a long career with the same company, feeling totally overwhelmed.
And many have never had to learn how to do this, until a layoff or a toxic workplace pushed them to.
Your career can change in only a few months from now
The work we do together during my career coaching and mentoring programmes on MentorCruise helps you move from “I have a lot of experience. How do I fit all of this into my CV?” to: “What is the strongest business case for hiring me for the next stage of my career?”.
That shift is what has helped my client move into very different conversations with the market: interviewing for Director and CEO roles, initiating conversations with headhunters, and applying for opportunities he was not even considering before.
Trust your intuition: you know you are capable of operating at a higher level
Change is possible, but without a clearer direction, it is very easy to spend months applying without understanding why the market is not responding. It's time to decide what you want to be hired for now. You may need to reposition your career and understand how employers in a new country or industry will interpret your background (and as a former recruiter and expat myself, I know that expectations change significantly in different work cultures).
In September, many professionals will restart applying because they want the new year to look different from the last one. If you are already thinking about a change, do not simply repeat the same approach that has produced little or no movement so far.
You still have four months before the end of the year. That is enough time to rethink how you present yourself, identify stronger opportunities, build better connections, and test a more focused job-search strategy. And if what you have tried until now has not worked, changing approach can only give you new information.
Sometimes the biggest breakthrough is not discovering a completely different career, but seeing your own background from a perspective you had never considered before: a stronger pattern in your achievements, a broader leadership story, or a type of role you had been overlooking.
Used well, these next few months can completely change the conversations you are having by January, and put you much closer to starting the year in a new company, in a better role, doing more of the work you are actually best at.
If you are an experienced professional planning a career change and you want to build that strategy properly, you can book a complimentary intro call with me here on MentorCruise to explore your goals, see if we are a match, and IF we click, learn more about my career coaching programmes.
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I'm Roberta, a former senior recruiter at Atlassian, Booking com and TomTom. ICF and Erikson Certified Career Coach based in the Netherlands. Visit my MentorCruise profile if you are looking to find a fulfilling, highly paid role in a new role, industry, or country.
