A lot of people come to me after weeks of silence. They have rewritten their resume twice. They have changed the font, the summary and the order of the sections. Nothing has changed in their results.
When I ask what they are applying for, the answer usually takes a while. "Operations, or project management, maybe customer success. Something in tech. I am open."
That answer is the problem. Being open feels flexible to you. To a recruiter, it reads as unclear. And an unclear resume gets passed over, even when the person behind it is good.
This is positioning. It is the decision you make before any tactic: which roles, at which level, in which field. Everything else in your search depends on it, so it deserves an hour of real thinking before you send another application.
What positioning actually means
Positioning is your honest answer to one question: where in the market can I win the next role?
It has three parts:
- Titles. Three to five job titles, written the way employers write them in their ads.
- Level. One band. Specialist, senior specialist, manager, director. Pick one.
- Function family. The area you work in, such as operations, finance, people, product or engineering. Titles inside one family can differ. Titles across families pull your resume in different directions.
Some people add a fourth part, the setting: company size, industry or region. That helps, but the first three matter most.
Notice what is missing from that list: the title you have now, and the title you wish you had. Positioning is about what your experience proves on paper, and what the market will pay you to do next.
Signs your positioning is the real problem
You probably need to fix your target, and not your resume, if any of these sound familiar:
- You apply to roles with very different titles in the same week.
- You rewrote your resume and your response rate did not move.
- You get replies for roles you did not want, and silence for the ones you did.
- You cannot describe your target in one sentence without the word "or".
- Your LinkedIn headline lists four different things you do.
None of these mean you lack experience. They mean the reader cannot see where you fit.
Step 1: Write down what you have actually done
Start with evidence, not titles. On one page, list:
- the results you are proudest of from the last few years;
- the size of what you managed: people, budget, customers, projects, sites;
- the tools, systems and methods you use every week;
- the problems people bring to you because you are the one who fixes them.
This page is the raw material. Your target has to be supported by it. If a title you like is not supported by anything on this page, it is a stretch goal, not a target.
Step 2: Choose three to five titles the market uses
Now search job boards and company career pages for roles that match your evidence. Do not search for your current title only. Search for the work.
Collect the titles that keep appearing for work you can do. You will see that one kind of work goes by several names. "Support Operations Manager", "Customer Experience Operations Manager" and "Service Delivery Manager" may all describe the same job in different companies.
Choose three to five of these. Keep them close to each other. If one title needs a completely different resume, it belongs in a separate search, later.
Step 3: Choose one level, honestly
Level is where most people get positioning wrong, in both directions.
Some aim too high because their title says "Head of" in a small company, while the ads for "Head of" in larger companies ask for a scope they have not had. Others aim too low because they are tired and want anything, and then get turned down as overqualified.
Look at the scope in the ads, not the title. How many people does the role lead? What budget or results does it own? Match that against your evidence page. Go for the level your scope clearly supports. Aim one step higher only when most of the scope in those ads is already on your page.
Step 4: Test your target against five real ads
This is the step almost nobody does, and it takes less than an hour.
- Pull five current ads for your main title.
- For each ad, list the three or four requirements it repeats or puts first.
- Hold your evidence page next to them.
- Mark each requirement: proven, partly proven, or missing.
If most requirements are proven across the five ads, your target is right, and your job now is to make that proof visible at the top of your resume. If many are missing, change the target before you change the resume. A better resume will not fix a target your experience cannot support.
Step 5: Write your one line, and use it everywhere
Once the target holds up, write one sentence:
"I am a [title] who [the result you are known for] in [the setting you know best]."
Keep it plain. No adjectives you cannot prove. Then put a version of that line in three places:
- the top of your resume, as the first line of your summary;
- your LinkedIn headline;
- the first sentence you say when someone asks "tell me about yourself".
When all three say the same thing, people remember you for one thing. That is the point.
A short example
Take a made-up case. Someone has spent several years in customer support, the most recent ones running the support team's tools, reports and processes. They apply to project manager jobs, operations manager jobs, customer success jobs and a few data analyst jobs. They get almost no replies.
Their evidence page shows something clear: they run support operations. They built the reporting, they fixed the ticket flow, they trained the team on new systems, and they lead a small group.
After the five-ad test, their target becomes three titles: Support Operations Manager, Customer Support Operations Lead and Customer Experience Operations Manager. One level, manager. One function family, customer operations.
Their one line becomes: "I am a support operations manager who makes customer teams faster and easier to run in growing software companies."
Nothing about their experience changed. What changed is that a recruiter can now see, in the first few lines, what they are for.
When to revisit your positioning
Positioning is a decision for this search, not a label for life. Give it a few weeks of real applications, then look at the data. Which titles bring replies? Which bring silence? If one title gets every response, lean into it. If none do, go back to Step 4 with fresh ads.
Changing your target every few days is a different problem. It resets the search each time, and nothing gets the chance to work.
If you want help with this
Positioning is where I start with almost everyone, because every other part of the search depends on it. In career and job search coaching, we work through your evidence, your titles and your level together, so you leave with a target you can defend and the method to test it yourself in every future search.
Dr. Hosney Adel