A progressive career is marked by stages, including the advancement to leadership.

Now that you have five, seven, or more years of experience under your belt and you're pursuing a mid-level position as a director, employers are quite interested in how your career has shaped over the years and are highly concerned with what you've been able to accomplish in past positions.

Your career achievements provide future employers a sneak peek into what you'll bring to the table for their company, so their importance cannot be overstated. Drawing from your past wins is one of the most important things you can do when positioning your resume for a director role. 

Of course, that's not the only thing you can do to successfully secure a higher-level position. In this article, you'll learn what it takes to properly craft a director-level resume and discover some important tips for putting everything together. 

What are the expectations of a director-level position?

When it comes to director-level positions, employers are often looking at your mid-career resume to see if you possess the following qualities:

  • Leadership capabilities: If you've held leadership positions in the past, even as an individual contributor. For example, were you a team lead? Were you tasked with onboarding or mentoring new members of the team? Were you appointed to lead training exercises for your department, act as the point person in a team project, or represent your group in a cross-functional project?

  • Strategic decision making: How you've been able to make strategic decisions or develop and implement strategies that helped you and your team meet the company's goals.

  • Management skills: If and how you managed, supervised, or mentored people as part of your previous responsibilities. Under your management, was your team able to hit or surpass their goals?

Now that you're a mid-career professional, employers are not solely concerned with your mastery of the technical skills involved in your field. They want to know if you've been able to develop the soft skills that will allow you to build, train, and manage your team to meet company-wide objectives.

They want to see that you have and can think like a business owner. And they want to know that you can take a step back from the day-to-day work to develop strategies for your team to execute that will help you achieve your goals.

How to position your resume for a director role

Apparently, prospective employers want a lot from job seekers who want a director-level role. That's okay, though, because you have what it takes to get the job done; you just need to make sure your director-level resume tells the tale. It all starts with picking the right format.

The reverse-chronological format

It may surprise you to know that even as you progress into higher-level positions at work, you should still use the tried-and-true reverse-chronological resume format. You have some leeway in things you can add to it, but it's a good idea to use it as your starting point. 

In fact, it's the bits that you add to the reverse-chronological resume that'll probably be what puts you over the top of other job seekers. As you probably know, resumes break content up into sections:

  • Contact information with relevant credentials

  • Title/headline

  • Profile paragraph

  • Skills

  • Professional experience

  • Education

When you're writing a director-level resume, you can add things to that, like a branding statement and a section called “Career Achievements.” You may even have additional extras like public speaking engagements or specialized research that you'll want to call attention to. 

  • A branding statement is a one-sentence statement that appears just beneath your title/headline. It's basically your slogan – what you stand for, how you work, and what you can achieve. Example from a Director of Talent Acquisition resume: Possess a track record for setting talent acquisition strategies and implementing inclusive hiring practices.

  • A “Career Achievements” section is a bulleted list of the top five things you've accomplished in the last ten years. Each bullet point should start with a power verb and be quantifiable. This means you need to find something from your career that you can assign a number to, for example, “Orchestrated global talent acquisition strategies that drove business scalability, increased qualified candidate pool by 30%, and reduced time-to-hire by 25%.”

To help you better visualize what a director-level resume might look like, take a look at this sample mid-level professional resume and this sample senior-level resume. You will also find this article on how to brag on your resume helpful as you structure your work history in a way that employers will find attractive.

The contact information of your director-level resume

Your contact information is likely going to remain the same as it appeared on your entry-level resume. Of course, you'll update it if you move or if your phone number changes. The only other change that might appear is a credential after your name. By the time you get to the point of writing a director-level resume, there may be some certification or high-level degree that you want to call immediate attention to. You do this by adding the acronym for it after your name. 

Here's what that looks like:

JOHN SMITH, SHRM-CP

Anytown, USA | 123-456-7890 | email@email.com

Be sure to indicate what SHRM-CP stands for in the education section of your resume. Also, avoid falling into the trap of adding every credential you've earned after your name. 

  1. It looks like grandstanding

  2. It clutters up your contact section

The title/headline of your director-level resume

Immediately after your contact information, you need to add a title that mirrors the job description and tells employers what you want to do next in your career. While a mere title will get the job done, it's a good idea to go above and beyond to write a headline. Check out the difference:

  • Title: Director of Talent Acquisition
  • Headline: Director of Talent Acquisition: Expert in Global Recruiting and Diversity Hiring

Which one looks better to you? Which one do you think is going to garner the attention of a hiring manager? 

When you add a branding statement (which you don't have to do), your director-level resume really pops off the page, and the hiring manager is only on the second line after your contact information!

JOHN SMITH, SHRM-CP

Anytown, USA | 123-456-7890 | email@email.com

Director of Talent Acquisition: Expert in Global Recruiting and Diversity Hiring

Set talent acquisition strategies and build high-performing teams in diverse industries

The profile paragraph of your director-level resume

You may be tempted to write your profile paragraph the instant you finish writing your headline and branding statement. Hold off on that, though. Write the rest of your resume first and then use your profile paragraph as a career summary that will help your readers know what they can expect to find as they review your resume. 

Whether you write it first or last, the profile paragraph of your director-level resume should be no more than three to five sentences that define how your career experiences will be a good fit for the new company. Use a strong mix of hard and soft skills (more on this in the next section), add at least one accomplishment, and don't forget to inject some personality. 

Here's an example of a profile paragraph for a director-level resume:

Visionary global recruitment strategy leader consistently exceeding talent acquisition goals and driving organizational growth across diverse industries. Known for transforming recruitment strategies to the point of individualizing plans and tailoring training and support to overcome employee challenges in organizations with 100s of employees. Adept at leveraging technology and data analytics to optimize recruitment processes, align talent acquisition efforts with organizational goals, and lead teams to drive results in dynamic environments. 

The skills list of your director-level resume

Let's talk about using a balance of hard and soft skills. Just beneath your profile paragraph, you should add a “Core Competencies” section that has a list of keywords and phrases that align with what's in the job description. 

This list should highlight the soft skills and hard skills you've built over the course of your career. 

  • Hard skills are those quantifiable abilities you've acquired through education, professional development, and hands-on experience

  • Soft skills are interpersonal skills you possess that allow you to get along with others, solve problems, and, most critically for a director, lead teams

Try to avoid turning the “Core Competencies” section of your director-level resume into a dumping ground for keywords. Stick to having no more than 15 hard and soft skills in this list. 

Some hard skills for directors include:

  • Sales

  • Business development

  • Project management

  • Financial management

  • Technical skills (e.g., computer programs)

  • Data analytics

  • Business strategy

Some soft skills for directors include:

  • Leadership

  • Communication

  • Emotional intelligence

  • Autonomous decision making

  • Adaptability

  • Influence and persuasion

  • Strategic thinking

The work history part of your director-level resume

Now, you're at the meat of your resume – your career history. This is the stuff that will make or break your candidacy for a director-level role, so it's critical that you do it right. 

First, you should go into writing this section knowing that you only need to detail the last 10-15 years of experience. Sticking to this timeframe will keep your resume relevant and fresh. Plus, remember, the human being hiring manager is only going to spend a few seconds glancing at your resume – they don't have time to pour through decades of job listings. 

In sticking with the reverse-chronology method of listing work history, start with your most recent position and go backward 10 years. You can add older experiences under an “Early Career Experience” section, but do not add bullets to those older job listings. 

Here's an example from a real director-level client – that Director of Talent Acquisition we talked about earlier:

Name of Company – City, CA | MM/YYYY–Present

DIRECTOR OF TALENT ACQUISITION 

Drive strategy, set/adhere to budgets, remove roadblocks, and scale business by addressing current and future talent needs and building a high-performing recruiting powerhouse that supports 5+ business units. Maintain a strong emphasis on long-term recruiting strategies, including on-campus recruiting, employer branding, diversity hiring, and operational efficiencies. Consistently recognized for building internal and external partnerships and authoring new procedures to attract candidates.

  • Develop comprehensive talent acquisition strategies, increasing qualified candidates by 30% and decreasing time-to-hire by 25% globally.

  • Manage recruitment budget and ensure compliance with all applicable laws and regulations, resulting in a 10% decrease in recruitment costs and zero legal violations.

  • Design and implement employee referral program, leading to a 50% increase in employee referrals and a 20% increase in employee retention globally.

Name of Company – City, CA | MM/YYYY-MM/YYYY

HEAD OF TALENT ACQUISITION (FULL-TIME)

Subject matter expert (SME) on using data and analytics to influence hiring decisions, including contingent hiring, budgeting, workforce planning, employer branding, and cultural engagement for entry-level through executive positions. Managed talent (including a team of recruiting professionals), developed programs, and implemented recruiting strategies that achieved metrics across as many as 6 corporate functions.

  • Spearheaded recruitment efforts across corporate functions, increasing hiring by 82% while reducing cost-per-hire by 20%.

  • Transformed diversity recruitment strategies, decreasing utilization of third-party agencies by 19% and cost-per-hire by 20%.

EARLY CAREER EXPERIENCE

  • Name of Company – City, CA | TALENT ACQUISITION CONSULTANT | MM/YYYY-MM/YYYY

  • Name of Company – City, CA | MANAGER OF TALENT ACQUISITION | MM/YYYY-MM/YYYY

The education section of your director-level resume

The last thing to do is to add your “Education and Credentials” to your resume. Be sure to spell out acronyms and add certifications/professional development. Also, you'll want to remove the graduation dates because, at this point in your career, it's probably been a few years since you earned your degree. 

Go win that interview

That's it! You now have a solid director-level resume that will win interviews and help you take the next steps on your career journey. Let your career achievements and the balanced mix of hard and soft skills on your resume sing your praises to win that interview!

Is your mid-career resume ready for director-level job openings? Find out with our free resume review!

This article began as a response to a Quora question written by Amanda Augustine in 2021. Marsha Hebert updated it in 2024.

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