How to clearly distinguish people and strategic management from account management roles on CV?

Question

I have about two years people and strategic management experience in my specific functional area (bizdev/account management for IT services) plus other years of junior management roles in previous fields I worked in (CRM coordinator, non-profit fundraising leader) before university studies. Also, after university I did a graduate program at a company within IT.

Within my current field it is common for titles to contain the word "manager" even if the person is not a line manager - i.e. manager often means managing relationships with clients or customers. However, at my company the leaders are called "team leaders" or "managers" and the individual contributors "executives".

I believe due to some confusion in the titles on my resume, many recruiting agencies are matching me for individual contributor roles and not considering me for real management roles. They also appear to not entirely understand when I try to clarify the situation; my impression is that they prefer trusting the industry conventions and also that they just skim through the resume.

Do you have any suggestions on how to clarify and emphasize on my CV the fact that my roles and experience are of people and strategic management level?

Answer 1

You are going to have to rewrite your work experience to include the "people management" and "strategic management" keywords and whatever keywords are associated with them. In addition, your description of your responsibilities should include the responsibilities commonly associated with strategic and people management. Example:

Marketing Analyst(March 2012=Present) Carried out research on the degree of penetration in the matrketplace of competitor products to the firm's Genoplex products .... Strategic management responsibilities include: ...

I suggest that you further go on Linkedin and review the profiles of individuals who have people and strategic responsibilities, see for yourself how they list and describe these responsibilities and duplicate their listing and describing into your own CV.

Stating the obvious: it is your responsibility to make your people and management responsibilities clear and not the agencies. This means the onus of the failure to communicate rests squarely on your shoulders and it is your responsibility to fix the failure to communicate.