Crafting a resume that tells a leadership story

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If you’re writing a leadership resume, you’ve probably been working for at least ten to fifteen years. At this stage in your career, a leadership story matters more than simply what jobs you’ve had. The resume at this point isn’t just to showcase your past experience but rather to pitch why you are the right leader for the job. In action, this looks like switching your resume from a responsibilities based explanation of your previous roles to an impact based explanation of your previous roles. The overly detailed, task based explanation of every single job you’ve ever held is making you seem more junior than you truly are. It is time to level up your resume to reflect the incredible leader you are.

Engage your readers- this is a story, not a list

Start your resume with a strong executive summary. This does not need to be long, just a few sentences is great. If someone only reads this and nothing else, they should get a good idea of who you are, what you’ve achieved, and what you’re excellent at. Here is an example:

I’m a trailblazing technology executive with a proven track record of building high-performing teams and delivering innovative products from the ground up. Known for scaling organizations and navigating complex technological landscapes, I combine strategic vision with hands-on leadership. My expertise spans product development, engineering management and organizational design, consistently delivering transformation and long term value across startups and enterprise environments in Banking and FinTech.

See? Simple, detailed, confident. Make sure you have at least one eye catching line highlighting your impact across your career.

Get the details right

Details are less important than the big picture in a leadership resume. We see this mistake often- senior candidates sometimes include far too many details in their resume that are making them look more junior and makes the resume difficult to read. That said, you need to make sure the details you include are all serving a purpose. Before we start rewriting the rest of your resume to highlight impact, do some housekeeping first. 

1. Use industry wide titles. Stop using company specific titles on your resume. Make sure the titles you choose are understood across the industry, it’s okay if it was not your exact job title. 
2. Don’t overdo the skills section. Unless you’re in a regulatory job or a very technical job, the skills section of your resume can probably go. Skills are a given at a leadership level and writing too long of a section here can make you seem more junior.
3. Show the journey, but you don’t need every job. There isn’t a magic number of roles or years of experience you should include on your resume, but know that you don’t need every detail. You should show the journey overall, but if a role isn’t serving the story (especially if it is an old position or was a short stint), feel free to take it out. You can keep a full, detailed version of your work history, but it doesn't have to be the resume you job search with.

CALL OUT: It is increasingly common for people to use GenAI to write their resumes, however, for senior leaders we encourage you to write it yourself or at least heavily edit the output. GenAI written content often has far too many superfluous details.

Rewrite each job and highlight impact

Now, go through every role and craft a story. Far too often, people go back to old resumes whenever they’re looking for a new job and simply add their most recent job onto it. We encourage you to start from scratch with a new one. Think about it- when you were more junior, you stuffed your resume with details about responsibilities you’d taken on, skills you’d acquired, tasks you’d completed and more. Often, you did this to seem more experienced and land a larger opportunity. But this is a bell shaped curve and as you get more senior, many responsibilities and skills are assumed and stating them on your resume can make you seem more junior than you are.

Now that you are more experienced, you have a better perspective on the impact of each role beyond these granular details. So rather than talk about all of the responsibilities of a coding job, you can talk about the impact of that job on the work of the organization. It is a subtle shift but a crucial one for an effective leadership resume.

Rewrite each role one by one and think of how that particular role fits into your story as a leader and a seasoned professional. Again, focus on impact.

Instead of: 

Sales Director:

• Hired and managed regional sales team
• Oversaw regional sales strategy implementation
• Coordinated with multiple teams including marketing, product, and finance to align go-to-market strategies
• Presented regular sales updates to senior leadership

Try: 

Sales Director:

• Scaled sales team to 15+ regional sales leaders, implemented a coaching program to help new sales leaders optimize their pipelines and close more business
• Reduced average sales cycle by three months by optimizing account managers and lead qualification
• Launched a cross-functional initiative that generated $5m in revenue in 2024 
• Provided leadership with real-time sales insights, driving quarterly planning

As you rewrite your experience, highlight metrics wherever you can and include specifics about ways you had an impact. Other great examples to include are moments of challenge or change, say, if you navigated an acquisition or turned things around after a difficult year.

If you’ve been in the same company for a while, you don’t need to show every single role, put it as one experience but include a short summary that explains the journey before you go into bullet points about your impact.

Structure

Structure is less important for senior leaders, but there are some key points we’d encourage you to keep in mind. For starters, you don’t have to send it to a designer or a professional to format it. While those fancy formats look nice, they aren’t necessary and are often difficult to read. A simple word document or PDF works fine. There is no magic resume page length. You know your journey best and if something feels important to you, you should keep it in, but keep in mind that it probably doesn’t have to be longer than two (maybe three) pages. A short resume can often convey a clearer, more concise story. 

In conclusion, your resume as a leader needs to tell a story about who you are, what impact you’ve had, and what you’re excellent at. Have more burning leadership resume questions? Send them to us at content@meytier.com and we’ll send them in a follow up! 

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