#TBCDiagnosis: When your senior marketing strategy resume reads like a project manager
These are from Career Clarity Move sessions, where the goal is to answer a career question you have in 1 hour. Usually it's "why am I not getting offers". All names and details are anonymized here. So if you have recommendations for names for the next ones, just send them over. I'm using list of UK baby names that I never hear in my real life.
#TBCDiagnosis: When your senior marketing strategy resume reads like a project manager
Piper has an MBA and a decade of marketing experience split between the biggest beauty FMCGs in the world from her home country and the biggest consumer electronics company from the Netherlands. On paper, that's a career most people assume recruiters go crazy for.
But she'd been applying to senior marketing strategy roles for months and heard almost nothing back. When she did hear something, it was a rejection with zero feedback attached.
So she booked a Career Clarity Move, a 1-time call where we figure out what exactly the problem in your job hunt is, because she wasn't sure if it was the job market, her experience, or something else she couldn't quite see.
I read her resume for 2 minutes, then told her exactly what I saw.
"This doesn't read like a strategist. It reads like a project coordinator."
Then I walked her through how I spotted it: how she'd framed certain projects, where her scope on paper didn't match the scope she described out loud, and what the work actually changed for the business.
Piper absorbed it, asked questions, and quickly saw what was obvious to me. She reacted the way most people do at this point:
"...Which is crazy, because my whole background is strategy for innovation, portfolio, and product. But I see now what you're talking about. It's really giving off project manager."
That one line sums up the whole diagnosis. Her experience wasn't lacking. She was a strong fit for most of the roles she was aiming for. The problem was the gap she couldn't see between the story she'd lived and the story her resume was telling.
At a senior level, not every bullet can describe something you did. Some of them have to describe something you decided. There was no version of her convincing a room, pushing back on a brief, or spotting a gap in the market before anyone assigned her to look for one. On paper, she was the person things happened to and handled it accordingly.
"So no wonder I keep getting project management roles. Of course they'll give me a ton of work streams to run. They can't see that I could own the whole portfolio, not just execute it. And I’m not telling them that either."
Here's what I keep seeing: People who've built up a strong background for a decade, now job hunting at a senior level for the first time. Until now, their reputation did the work: someone knew them, someone vouched for them, they got the job.
Now a stranger has 6 seconds and a PDF.
These same high performers have never had to learn how they come across, so they don't know their own personal brand, and it shows up as confusion. Interviews that go fine but never convert. Recruiters unsure which box to put them in. Offers for the wrong level. From the outside, it just looks like silence.
You can't proofread your way out of that. The things that feel obvious to you, because you lived them, are exactly what a stranger will never know unless someone shows you where the story breaks. You need a reader who wasn't there.
That's the job. Not rewriting your resume, but telling you where the story you think you're telling doesn't match the one people are reading: on paper, on LinkedIn, and in the room.
If you've read this far, here's the rest of what we got through in that one hour. Consider it a thank-you for your attention and a sneak peek of what we could talk about as well.
Which brand she should sell: strategy and analytical vs. creative. We worked through which one she's good at, which one she actually wants to be hired for, and which one hiring managers are paying for right now.
Doer or decider: the difference between a project manager (handed the decision, pushes it through) and someone who owns the call, and which one she wants to be at this point in her career. We also landed on a role she hadn't even considered until we got there.
Telling the same project 2 ways: 1 version for a strategy role, 1 for a project role, built from a single brain dump.
What to do about a skill you're missing: 4 options, and "go learn it yourself" is the one I like least.
A tiny link trick to find out whether recruiters actually click through to her LinkedIn.
Resume housekeeping: from what goes in the summary to what order the sections go in to how to talk about go-to-market and strategy work in the resume.
Her coffee chats: why great referrals kept getting her the meeting, but her story wasn't turning it into an interview. This includes what happens when your friends hype you up and then the story doesn't match.
The gap since your last role: how to talk about time between jobs on the resume and in interviews so it reads as moving forward, not waiting.
This is who I coach. People whose experience is the strongest out of all the applicants, but whose resume and story just haven't caught up to it yet.
And it's why I offer these calls. You're not paying for an hour of listening. You're paying for an expert eye that has seen this mismatch dozens of times and can name it in 2 minutes, so you stop burning months on applications that were never going to land.
If that sounds a little too familiar, Career Clarity Move is a 60-minute session built for exactly this: your resume and your target roles on the table, with someone who isn't too close to your story to see what's actually there.
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The Bumpy Career's Career Clarity Move is for the high achiever who isn't getting offers, even though their interviews are going great.
It’s to diagnose, audit, and prescribe what to change to hit that ideal goal. Meaning: whether you've got 5 years of experience or 15, the fix is the same. You need someone who knows how to read a resume and clock what vibe you’re giving off in 2 minutes flat. And then can diagnose what’s the actual story you lived and how it’s mismatching with the story on the page.
That's where I come in.
In 60 minutes, I tell you exactly where the mismatch is: on paper, on LinkedIn, in your interview answers, and in the interviewer’s perception. So you leave knowing what to fix and why, instead of another few months of applications into silence.
If that sounds like where you are right now, you can book your own Career Clarity Move here and let's figure out what's actually been getting in your way.