The Chief of Staff Resume That Landed a Director-Level Interview

When my client came to me, she had been a Chief of Staff for three years. She was running cross-functional programs, managing a $12M budget, and directly influencing C-suite decisions. On paper, she was a director. In the market, she was invisible.

Her resume read like a job description. It listed tasks. It described scope. But it never once communicated the strategic impact of her work. This is what I call the Seniority Gap, and it's one of the most expensive blind spots in career positioning.

The Problem: Task-Based Narratives

Most high-performers make the same mistake: they describe what they did instead of why it mattered. They write resumes for their current manager, not for the hiring committee evaluating them for the next level.

My client's original resume had bullets like:

"Managed cross-functional projects and coordinated with senior leadership on strategic initiatives."

This tells you nothing. It doesn't signal seniority. It doesn't communicate impact. It doesn't differentiate her from someone three levels below doing "project coordination."

The Fix: The SSIP Framework

SSIP stands for Story, Skills, Impact, Positioning. It's the framework I use with every client to transform task-based narratives into strategic positioning.

Here's how we restructured her story:

Story

We assess the context: what was happening at the organization? She was brought in during a period of rapid growth when the CEO needed someone to translate strategic vision into operational execution across four business units.

Skills

We identify the exact skills deployed. She designed cross-functional prioritization systems, built alignment across four business units, and brought operational clarity to a company that had none. These are skills that signaled director-level strategic thinking.

Impact

What changed because of her work? She designed and implemented a quarterly planning framework that aligned 4 business units, reduced duplicated initiatives by 40%, and contributed to a 23% increase in on-time delivery of strategic goals.

Positioning

We define the professional positioning. She wasn't just a "Chief of Staff." She was the architect of operational strategy at scale. That positioning opened doors to Director-level conversations because the narrative finally matched the altitude of her work.

The Result

Within two weeks of launching her repositioned materials, she received interview requests from three companies, including a Director of Strategy role at a Series C startup that came with a $75K salary increase over her previous compensation.

She didn't get more experience. She didn't get another certification. She repositioned the experience she already had.

The Takeaway

If you're operating above your title, the problem isn't your experience. It's your narrative. The market can only value what it can see. And if your materials are written at the wrong altitude, you'll keep getting evaluated for the wrong level.

That's not a personal failure. It's a positioning problem. And positioning problems have positioning solutions.