You’ve achieved your targets every year, led teams through layoffs and restructurings, and built a CV any recruiter would call strong. So why does the silence after you apply feel puzzling and personal?
The most qualified person rarely gets the offer. The person who can clearly explain their value and gets into the right room before the role is posted gets the offer.
As a recruitment professional, I’ve seen this play out for years, recruiting for international and local companies. Most Executives get stuck tweaking their CVs, assuming the CV will do the talking for them. But if they stop to think about it, having been a hiring manager many times over themselves, they know that hiring decisions do not come down to comparing bullet points to job descriptions. They’re trying to answer one question: what do I need to believe about this person to put my reputation behind them?
That’s the question your UVP, your unique value proposition, has to answer before you submit anything. If you can’t say in a few sentences what you do better than the other people being considered for that Executive seat, the market writes that story for you, and it usually gets it wrong.
I don’t mean “strategic leader who drives results.” I mean something specific enough that a recruiter could repeat it back to their hiring manager without you in the room.
Here’s one thing you can do today. Open a blank doc and finish this sentence: “I specialise in ___, and it solves ___ for the companies that hire me.” Keep it to two or three sentences, skip the hedging and the buzzwords, and you have your UVP. Most executives have never written theirs down.
Here’s what changes once you’ve written it. A recruiter stops asking generic screening questions and starts probing the specific thing you said you do, because now there’s something concrete to test.A referral conversation stops sounding like “let me know if you hear of anything” and starts sounding like “you should talk to my friend, she’s the one who fixed our supply chain after the acquisition.” That’s the version of you that gets a phone call instead of silence after a networking meeting or a form rejection from an Applicant Tracking System (ATS).
If you know a director or VP staring down a transition right now, tell them to define their UVP. Most people skip this step and go straight to networking and applying. They don’t find out that was the actual problem until the silence has already cost them the role and months of time.
