How to position yourself for a job before you tailor a single line

Almost everyone starts a job search the same way: find a posting, open your resume, and start bending the bullets toward the words in the job description. The resume comes out looking like an inventory of everything you've done, and you're quietly hoping the person reading it connects the dots into a reason to hire you.

This article covers the step that comes before any of that. Work out how you're selling yourself first: what kind of problem you're the answer to, who you're for, and what's uniquely true about you compared with the other people they could hire. Do that work once, before you start applying, because every decision after it gets easier when you already know what you're claiming.

The thinking here borrows from April Dunford, who has done positioning work for around 200 tech companies and wrote Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch; Phyl Terry, author of Never Search Alone, who was on the founding team of the first company Amazon acquired and coined the term candidate market fit; and Lauren Ipsen, who recruits senior executives at Daversa Partners. Every quote plays the exact moment it was said.

Why a position works better than a list

A list of accomplishments asks the reader to do the work. They read fifteen bullets across three jobs and have to decide for themselves what you're good at and whether it matters here. Most readers won't bother, because they're skimming a stack of candidates and looking for a reason to move you forward.

A position gives them that reason directly. It's a single claim about what you're for, and everything else on the page becomes evidence for that claim. Whatever they repeat to their colleagues after they close your resume is the claim you're going to be judged on, so you may as well be the one who wrote it.

Dunford spends her working life on this problem for products, and her definition is worth borrowing wholesale even though she's talking about software companies, not job candidates.

Dunford is describing products. Nobody is a product, and you shouldn't talk about yourself like one. But the four questions underneath her definition transfer cleanly to a job search, and they're the four you should be able to answer before you apply anywhere you care about.

Answer the four questions about yourself

Sit down with a blank page and work through these in order. It takes an hour, and you only redo it when your goal changes.

1. Who else could they hire? Dunford starts every engagement here, and she's strict about what counts.

Her status quo point is the useful one for a job seeker. Your competition isn't only the other four finalists. It's also the company doing nothing: leaving the role open another quarter, splitting the work across two existing people, or handing it to an agency. Plenty of searches end that way. So your position has to beat both the other finalists and the option of not hiring anyone.

Write down who the other finalists probably are. For a senior product role at a Series B company, it might be three people from bigger companies with more polished titles and one internal candidate. That list changes what you should emphasize.

2. What's true about you that isn't true of them? Skip the things you're simply good at, because the other finalists are good at those too. You're looking for what you have that they don't. Ten years in a regulated industry. You've done the zero-to-one version and the scale version of the same job. You're bilingual in engineering and sales. You've turned around a team that was about to quit. Make the list long and unfiltered first, then cut anything the other finalists could also claim.

3. So what? Go down the list and translate each item into what it's worth to an employer. Dunford calls this the "so what" pass, and it's where most self-descriptions fall apart. "Ten years in fintech" is a fact. What it's worth is that you already know which product decisions will get killed by compliance, so you don't waste two quarters finding out. Do this for every item and you'll usually end up with two or three themes rather than fifteen separate facts.

4. Who cares most about that? Some companies will pay a real premium for your themes, and some will shrug. A company that's been burned by a compliance failure cares enormously about the fintech answer. A company that's never been regulated doesn't care at all. The set of companies who care most is the set you should be applying to hardest.

Find your candidate market fit

Phyl Terry has been running job search councils for job seekers since the dot-com crash, and he coined the phrase for the fourth question above. He starts people with the same move a product team makes.

The practical version: write down your draft position, then take it to eight or ten people and ask what they think you're a fit for. Terry's favorite opener is what he calls the golden question, "if you were in my shoes, how would you approach this?" Former colleagues can tell you what you were actually known for, which is often different from what you think. Recruiters can tell you how the market is pricing your background this quarter. Both will correct a draft position faster than another hour of staring at the page.

Then narrow it. This is the part people fight hardest.

Terry also points out that candidate market fit moves with the market, and that this is worth knowing rather than taking personally. When a lot of VPs are taking director roles, the director roles get harder to win at any given level of talent. That's supply and demand doing its thing, and it says nothing about whether you're good.

Read a job description for what they're actually buying

Now the job description becomes a much easier document to read, because you're testing a specific claim against it instead of hunting for keywords.

Read it three times. The first pass is for the problem: why does this job exist right now, and what's going wrong without it? A posting that spends four bullets on "establishing process" and "aligning stakeholders" is describing a company where nothing ships on time. A posting heavy on "0 to 1" and "ambiguity" is describing a company that hasn't found the thing yet. Write one sentence naming the problem you think they're buying a solution to.

The second pass is for the order. The first three requirements carry most of the weight, and everything below "nice to have" carries almost none. Whoever wrote the posting put the things keeping them up at night near the top.

The third pass is for vocabulary. Use their words for the work you've done, since the recruiter searching their system uses the words from their own posting. The resume tailoring playbook covers that mechanic in detail.

Then run the test: does my position answer the problem in that first sentence? Not "could I do this job," which is almost always yes and is the wrong question. Does the specific claim I'm making point directly at the thing they're worried about?

When your position doesn't answer the job description

Sometimes it won't, and that tells you something useful. You have three honest options.

Reframe. Your position stays true, and you lead with a different part of it. If your claim has three components and this job only cares about one, put that one first and let the others sit further down. You're changing the order, and the underlying claim is the same.

Reposition on purpose. If you keep hitting the same wall across a dozen postings you want, the market is telling you your position is aimed somewhere that isn't hiring. Go back to the four questions and pick a different theme to lead with. This is a real decision and it takes a few weeks to work through, so make it deliberately rather than one application at a time.

Skip it. The application where you can't say what problem you're the answer to is the one where you'll write a generic cover letter and never hear back. Terry's spear point applies here. Ten applications where your position clearly answers the posting will beat sixty where it doesn't.

There's a fourth option that isn't about the posting at all: get a person inside the company to look at your case before the resume does. A referral from someone who can restate your position in their own words is worth more than any amount of bullet editing. The foot in the door playbook covers how to build that path.

Make everything point at the same claim

Dunford makes a point about sales pitches that transfers directly. A pitch has to answer one question, and the same question sits underneath every interview.

Again, she's talking about companies selling software. But "why pick us over the alternatives" is what a hiring committee is deciding when they compare four finalists, and your materials either answer it or leave them to guess.

Once you have your position, three things carry it:

The resume. Every bullet is evidence for the claim or it's taking up space. Your summary line states the position in a sentence. The bullets under your most recent role prove the parts of it you're leading with.

The "tell me about yourself" answer. Ninety seconds that state the position and give one proof point for each part of it. Then stop. The tell me about yourself playbook covers the structure.

The behavioral answers. The stories you pick should be the proof behind your claim rather than a random selection of things that went well. If your position is about turning around struggling teams, your "tell me about a conflict" answer should come from one of those turnarounds. The behavioral interview questions playbook covers building each story.

All of that only holds up if you've said it out loud before it counts. Ipsen watches senior candidates work this out live in real interviews, usually at companies they wanted.

One position, written three ways

Here's what this looks like for one person. Maya has eight years in product, the last four at a healthcare company, and she's applying for director roles at Series B startups in regulated markets.

On the resume, her summary reads: "Product director who ships in regulated markets. Built the compliance-first spec process at Company X and cut legal review from five weeks to eight days across 40 launches." The first three bullets under her current role are all evidence for that. The bullet about a mobile redesign she's proud of moves down, because it argues for a claim she isn't making.

In her opening answer, she says: "I'm a product director and I spend most of my time on products that ship into regulated markets. Four years ago I joined Company X when they were moving into healthcare for the first time, and their launches were slipping by a quarter each because legal review showed up at the end. I rebuilt how we spec things so compliance requirements go in at the start, and we got review down from five weeks to eight days. I'm looking for the same problem at a company that's earlier in that transition, which is why I wanted to talk to you."

In a behavioral answer about a disagreement with a stakeholder, she picks the time her general counsel wanted to block a launch two days out, how they got to a scoped-down version that shipped on time, and what she changed in the process afterward so it never happened again. The story answers the question, and it also proves the claim.

Notice how narrow Maya's claim is. She's saying she's the obvious answer to one specific problem at one type of company, and she never claims to be the strongest product director on the shortlist. Her version is something a hiring manager can repeat to their boss in one sentence, which is what you're going for.

Frequently asked questions

Doesn't a narrow position mean fewer jobs I can apply to?

You'll send fewer applications and hear back from more of them. If you stay broad you look like a plausible option at a lot of companies and the obvious choice at none of them, and hiring managers hire the obvious choice. If narrowing feels too risky, hold your position for the twenty jobs you actually want and stay generic for everything else, but don't expect much from the generic pile.

What if I'm changing careers and have no track record in the new field?

Then your position leans on the second question rather than the first. What's true about you that isn't true of the people who came up through the standard path? A teacher moving into customer success has run a room of thirty people who didn't want to be there, every day, for six years. Name the thing you bring that they don't have, and be honest about what you'll need to learn.

How is this different from a personal brand?

A personal brand is about how you're known publicly, and most people don't need one. A position is a working answer to why this company should hire you over the other finalists. You can have a strong position and no online presence at all.

Should the position go on my LinkedIn headline?

Yes, in a short form. The headline that says what problem you solve gets more useful inbound than the one that repeats your job title and company. Keep it to a sentence someone could say back to you.

How often should I redo this?

When your goal changes, or when a dozen applications into a search the responses aren't coming. Otherwise it's stable. The reordering you do per application is a different, much smaller job.

Isn't this just spin?

No, as long as every part of the claim is backed by work you actually did and can talk about for two minutes under follow-up questions. Selection is honest and everyone does it. Inventing a claim you can't defend falls apart in the first interview.

The method on one page