Landing IC interviews as a Director? Two things to change

This Director of Platform Engineering kept landing only individual contributor roles, until we changed two things.

When we started working together, he had enough experience to have VP-level conversations, but the market kept pulling him toward IC positions. That usually means something in the search is sending the wrong signal.

1. His positioning

The first thing we changed was his positioning.

His resume and LinkedIn were packed with technical details, systems, tools and projects. That made him look technically strong, but it didn't immediately tell a hiring manager what kind of business problems he could be trusted to solve.

If you want to mean business, that distinction matters.

When someone reads your profile, they should be able to answer three questions almost immediately:

What problem do you solve?

What kind of companies do you solve it for?

At what scale have you done it?

For example, "led cloud migration using AWS, Kubernetes and Terraform" tells me what you worked with.

"Led a 300-person engineering organization through a cloud transformation for a global financial services business" tells me the level at which you operated.

Remember: You are not a Github account; you’re a real person (and a great one at that <3 ).

2. How he approached the search

The second change was how we approached the job search itself.

He was applying broadly because more applications felt like more opportunities. But a senior-level search doesn't work that way. We narrowed the target to roles where his background was an unusually strong fit, then identified the actual hiring manager for each one. All jobs aren’t created equal.

From there, the application and outreach worked together.

Instead of sending a resume into an ATS and hoping somebody noticed, we were putting his background directly in front of the person responsible for deciding who got interviewed.

We simply made it painfully obvious for the market to understand where he belonged.

That small change in execution made a huge difference because now the right person was seeing the right story.

The right companies need to understand what you solve, recognize the scale you've operated at, and see you as the answer to a problem they already have.

Once that happened, he was able to land 11 VP of Platform Engineering interviews within the first two months of working with us.

Takeaways

Takeaways from this story:

1: Showcase your technical leadership experience, not your tech stack.

2: Apply to the right roles, follow up with the right people.

3: Let someone who actually knows what they’re doing handle it. You’ve been job-hunting the wrong way for FAR too long.

Book a call with us to get started.