Your Introduction Matters

A senior director called me last month.

She’d been looking for six months. 52 applications. 4 interviews. 0 offers.

The first thing she said on our call was, “I think I’m just too senior for the market right now.”

I hear some version of that sentence almost every week.

Here’s what was actually happening: she was opening every interview by walking them backwards through her career. 18 years in four tidy chapters. By the time she finished, she’d already answered every question they might have asked and told them almost nothing about how she’d show up in the role they were actually hiring for.

The first session, we didn’t touch her resume. We didn’t rehearse answers. We worked on one thing:

How does she answer “tell me about yourself” in 90 seconds, starting from what the role needs, not from where she started.

She took the next interview from that framing. Offer came 8 weeks later.

The issue was never that she was too senior. The issue was that she was introducing herself to every interviewer as her past instead of as their future.

If you’re a senior leader in a long search right now, it’s worth asking when you walk into an interview, are you opening with where you’ve been, or with why you’re right for where they’re going?