Your next senior role, part 2: make your case easy for other people to repeat

In part 1 of this series you worked out what you want and what you won’t trade. This part is about the reverse: making it easy for a company to see what you’re for.

Here is how a senior GCC hire usually travels. A consultant speaks to you for 45 minutes and writes a summary. That summary goes to the head of talent acquisition, who forwards it to the GCC head, who mentions you in a call with a global function head in London or New Jersey. By the time the person with the final say hears your name, you’ve been retold three times by people who each had other things on their mind.

You can’t sit in those conversations. You can hand everyone in the chain the same short version of your case, in your words, so the retelling stays close to what you said. That is the job of the document below.

Think of it as a pre-read you send ahead of any conversation that matters. I’d keep it to a single page for GCC roles, because it will be printed, forwarded and read on a phone between meetings, and five sections cover it.

What you’re hired to fix takes about 150 words in the first person. Name the problem you’re best at, the kind of centre where you do it well, and how you think a function like yours should run. ‘I take engineering teams in new GCCs from delivery work to owning a product, usually in the second or third year’ tells a reader more than a list of strengths.

Three to five outcomes come next, as short bullets, each with a number and a timeframe, and each one you could defend for ten minutes. Say what you inherited as well as what you left, because scope without a starting point is hard to read.

How you work covers how you make decisions, how you run a leadership team, what your teams would say you’re hard on. Be specific, even where it’s less flattering. ‘I review every senior hire’s first 90-day plan myself’ is something a hiring manager can picture.

What others say is two or three short quotes from a manager, a peer and someone who reported to you, with their roles.

Something you’ve made closes the page: a talk, an article, an internal paper you’re allowed to share, a podcast you appeared on. One or two links is enough. If you have nothing, write one short piece on a problem you know well. It gives the panel a sense of how you think before they’ve met you.

When a search consultant screens a senior candidate, the outcomes are where most of the conversation goes. We ask what the team looked like when you arrived, what you changed, what the number was before and after, and who else could claim part of it. A bullet that survives those four questions is worth keeping. A bullet that falls apart under them does more harm than leaving it off.

GCC leaders run into one problem here that others don’t. Much of what you’ve achieved sits inside a parent company’s confidential numbers. Use ranges and ratios: ‘cut release cycle time by roughly half across 6 product teams’ is fine where a revenue figure isn’t. And never put the parent’s unannounced plans in writing. A hiring manager who sees you share your current employer’s secrets will assume you’d share theirs.

Ask for a few lines from colleagues while the work is fresh, ideally when you or they move on. A quote written the week a project closes names the project. One written two years later says you were great to work with, which every reference says.

Then, once you’re in a process, call each referee before the company does. Tell them the role, what the hiring team seems worried about, and which piece of your work with them is most relevant. Formal references for senior hires tend to come late, sometimes after the offer has been drafted, and a referee who has to think on the spot about which project you mean is a poor last impression. It takes ten minutes, and many candidates skip it.

The brief does most of its work in direct conversations. Attach it when someone introduces you, when a consultant asks for your CV (send both), and in the thank-you note after each interview. If you know who’s on a panel, send it to each of them before the meeting. Relying on HR to circulate it means half the panel reads it in the lift.

Change the top three lines for each role so they answer that company’s brief, and keep the rest steady. Ask two peers to read it cold and tell you what they think you do. If their answer doesn’t match your first paragraph, rewrite the paragraph.

Search consultants read your LinkedIn before they call, so make the headline say what your brief says. Changing ‘VP Engineering’ to ‘VP Engineering · building product engineering in India GCCs’ tells them the job you want next. If you’re employed, use LinkedIn’s ‘Recruiters only’ open-to-work setting rather than the public banner. LinkedIn tries to hide it from recruiters at your own company but doesn’t guarantee it, so treat it as discreet and assume it could be seen.

In part 3, out on 21 October, I’ll get to where this page earns its keep: the network, the search firms, and the senior roles that are filled without ever being posted. Before then, one exercise to try: if a former manager had to describe you in two sentences to a stranger tomorrow, what would you want those sentences to be?