I spent an hour last week with a guy—let’s call him Mark. Mark is a VP of Operations. He’s been in the game for 15 years. He sent me his resume and said, “I just can’t seem to get interviews anymore.”

I read it.

Honestly? It was fine. Clean format. No typos. All the big jobs listed.

But it was boring.

It read like a job description. "Responsible for P&L." "Oversaw team of 50." "Managed vendor relationships."

Here’s the thing: if I’m a board member or a CEO hiring for a VP, I don't really care what you were responsible for. I care about what you did about it. Did the team get better? Did the vendors screw you less? Did the P&L stop bleeding cash?

Most executive resumes miss the mark because they confuse activity with impact.

The "So What?" Test

You need a filter. Every single bullet point you write, you should read it out loud and ask: "So what?"

  • "Led a team of 20 salespeople." So what?
  • "Implemented a new CRM system." So what?

The answer to "so what" is your impact.

  • "Led a team of 20 salespeople to exceed regional quota by 30% for two consecutive years."
  • "Implemented a new CRM system that cut data entry time in half and improved lead follow-up speed by 15%."

See the difference? One tells me you had a job. The other tells me you were good at it.

Titles don't tell the whole story

Titles are messy. One company's "Director" is another company's "Manager." One VP has ten people reporting to them, another VP has a hundred.

You can't just list the title and assume people get it. You have to paint the picture. How big was the budget? How many direct reports? Were you brought in to fix something broken, or to scale something that was working?

Context matters. If you turned around a failing division, say that. If you built a team from zero to sixty, say that. The numbers give scale, but the context gives the story.

Stop writing for HR

This sounds harsh. But here's the reality: your resume first gets scanned by a recruiter or an AI, sure. But if it passes that test, it lands on the desk of someone who does your job, or used to.

That person is busy. They’re reading your resume between meetings, probably on a laptop with 12 tabs open. They don't want to hunt for the good stuff.

You need to make it obvious. Use bold for the numbers. Put the outcome at the front of the bullet. Don't bury the lead.

Think about it like this: a junior person writes about what they did. A senior person writes about what changed because they did it.

The "less is more" trap

People tell executives to be concise. They say "keep it to two pages."

Look, if you've been working for 20 years and you've done genuinely important stuff, two pages might not be enough. Three is fine. Four is risky, but sometimes necessary.

The goal isn't page count. The goal is density of signal. Don't cut out your biggest achievements just to save a line. Cut out the noise instead. That old job from 1998? It can be one line. The board-level strategy role? That gets three bullets.

It’s about real estate. Give the most space to the stuff that matters most right now.

A quick thing on leadership

Leadership isn't a soft skill. Not really. It’s the ability to make a group of people more effective than they would be on their own. So show that.

Don't say "proven leader." Show me a time when you had to convince a skeptical team to buy into a new direction. Show me a time when you had to let someone go because they weren't the right fit, and how the team performed better afterward. Show me a mentorship that resulted in a promotion.

Leadership is a series of hard decisions. Give me one or two.

The bottom line

Your resume isn't a history book. It's a highlight reel. And at the executive level, the highlight isn't that you showed up. It's that things moved because you were there.

So take a second look at your resume. If it reads like a list of jobs you've held, you're probably leaving something on the table. Go find the "so whats." They're in there somewhere. You just have to dig them out.

It’s like telling someone what you did and then showing them the polaroid.

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