Last updated: 17th Feb 2026
Up to 80% of executive roles are filled without ever being advertised. No job board. No public hiring process. Just network taps.
If you’re approached for one of these roles, don’t allow their attention to go to your head. You’re not “in.” You’re under scrutiny.
This is not the moment to send a generic resume. At executive level, relevance wins. Your executive resume must do one thing: prove you are the solution to that business’ commercial challenge.
That requires tailoring. Here’s how to do it properly.
1. Do Your Due Diligence.
You can’t demonstrate that you’re the best fit for the job if you don’t actually know much about the job.
When you’re approached to submit your resume – whether it’s by a recruiter, an industry colleague, a current company decision-maker, or anybody else – you’ll be tempted to send it off as soon as possible.
You want to get your details into the right hands, after all. Right?
Tamp down your sense of urgency – and get more details about the open role so you can create a document that makes a strongest possible impression.
Dig into these 3 areas:
- What is the mandate? Request a position description if the person who approached you didn’t offer it. You need to understand what you’re walking into (is it a reinvention, crisis, accelerated growth or sustaining success situation?).
- What’s the company culture like? The more senior you are, the more you should care about culture fit. Take time to study the leadership team. Dig into the company’s history.
- What is the industry like? This is particularly important if you’re moving to a new industry. Is there an unusual amount of regulatory scrutiny? What political forces are at play? Look into recent M&A activity – it will tell you a lot about how insiders feel about the industry.
2. Study The Job Description.
Tailoring of your resume doesn’t start with your resume.
It starts with the job description.
Review it carefully. Pull out keywords, areas of experience, and competencies the employer is looking for.
You’ll end up with a list of qualities and descriptive words that are important to the potential employer.
Important!
This list serves as your roadmap as you stay focused on this single goal: Incorporating this information (honestly, of course) into your own document.
Here’s an example job description that shows important keywords (highlighted in yellow) and key areas of experience (highlighted in red).
Above: Job description for a Director of Sales & Marketing at Accor.
Summarising this information, you can see this company is looking for a candidate who:
- Has worked as a leader in sales and marketing, reporting directly to the GM
- Has led strategy development and execution
- Has worked in luxury, 5-star, branded hotel environments
- Has demonstrated experience driving growth with proven revenue improvement
- Is a leader and developer of people and teams
Other themes and keywords that bubble to the surface include innovation, excellence, inspiring, and uniqueness.
3. Tweak Your Resume’s Headline.
With a better sense of exactly what the employer is looking for, it’s time to turn your attention to your resume headline.
This goes directly under your name on your resume. It must reflect not just the experience you’ve already had but also the role you hope to fill.
Important!
The headline 1) summaries your experience and 2) offers an insight into your aspirations.
You don’t want to misrepresent your experience here. But in most cases, you should be able to use the title of the open role.
It’s a simple way to demonstrate an immediate match.
For example, if your resume currently says “Head of Sales and Marketing”, you would change it to “Director of Sales and Marketing” when submitting your information for this vacancy.
You could even go a step further and bring the luxury hotel experience directly into your headline. That might look like this:
This seemingly small change can make a huge difference when catching the attention of the hiring decision-makers.
4. Customise Your Resume’s Profile.
Your profile (often also called your professional summary or your career summary) appears near the top of your resume.
This is one of the first areas a potential employer will review.
Important!
It needs to be strong – and that’s why you must spend time tweaking it to incorporate key aspects of the job description.
Revisit your highlighted text to see how you can swap in some of those details.
Take a look at this before and after for some inspiration.
We start with a fairly boilerplate, generic resume profile –
And by adding phases from the job description, we transform it into a profile that tells the recruiter you’re a match for the role.
5. Refine Your Resume’s Key Assets.
Your resume’s front page must include either a skills chart or a bulleted list of your key assets.
You can apply a similar strategy to what you used for your profile here by:
- Change the wording. If your key assets originally referred to your general hospitality experience (to capture opportunities outside of hotels), include the specific word “hotels” for this particular job opportunity – as that’s what the employer is looking for.
- Check for relevance. If some of your existing key assets are a poor patch to this specific open role, remove them and replace them with more relevant achievements.
- Reshuffle the order. Your most impressive assets must appear at the top of the list.
6. Revisit The Professional Experience.
I don’t recommend that you make substantial changes to the professional experience section of your resume without guidance.
If you had your resume professionally written, the writer made sure that your experience is aligned to the roles you discussed.
However, there is one small tweak you can make to sharpen this section’s alignment: change the order of your bullet points.
As you did in your key asset section, you can move responsibilities and achievements that are particularly relevant toward the top of your work history.
This subtly changes your value proposition.
In the example above, strategy development and team leadership are two crucial responsibilities. If you have evidence of these in your past position, move them up so they get the spotlight.
Irene
