Reading a role advert as a spec
A role description is a negotiated document. Read what it was arguing about, not what it asks you to tick.
A role description is not a wish list. It is the residue of an argument between a chair or a chief executive and a people function, and the clauses that survived that argument are the only ones worth reading closely.
Read it as a specification and it becomes far more useful than it looks. Read it as a list of requirements to satisfy and it tells you almost nothing you can use.
Read it in the order it was written
The first two responsibilities are nearly always what the role exists to fix. Anything that appears twice in different words is the real mandate, restated by a second author. Anything expressed as a number, a named system or a named regulator is not negotiable.
The desirable block is usually a hedge. It is where disagreements were parked rather than settled, and treating it as a checklist is how a strong record gets rewritten in the wrong direction.
Mirror the vocabulary, not the sentences
Market alignment is not keyword stuffing. The real problem is that identical work is named differently across sectors and geographies, so a record written in one dialect reads as foreign in another.
One organisation calls it demand planning. The next calls it S&OP. A third calls it integrated business planning and means something slightly larger. If your record uses one term and the market you are moving towards uses another, you are not being read as unqualified. You are not being read at all.
Led demand planning and inventory control for the India business.
Ran the integrated business planning cycle for India: one consensus forecast a month, signed jointly by commercial and operations, carried straight into the supply plan.
Identical work. The second uses the vocabulary of the market being addressed and names the mechanism, so a reader recognises it in one pass instead of translating it first.
One rule governs any rewrite of this kind: it must stay true. If the cycle was never a consensus process, do not call it one. The point is to remove translation cost, not to borrow language you cannot defend.
Function names date a profile
Some vocabulary carries a decade with it. Materials management, personnel, MIS: each was exactly right once, and each now locates the writer in an era rather than in a function.
Update the noun where the work genuinely matches the current definition, and leave it where it does not. A dated term used precisely reads better than a current term used loosely.
Match your first six lines to the shape
Strip three current adverts for the role you want down to nouns and verbs. You will usually find the same three to five demands underneath: a cost line to take out, a function to rebuild, a system to land, a board or a regulator to satisfy, a market to enter.
Now read the first six lines of your own record. They will almost certainly answer a different set, because they were written for the role you last held rather than the one in front of you.
Accomplished operations leader with 18 years of experience across manufacturing and logistics, known for driving operational excellence.
Operations leader, 18 years across manufacturing and third-party logistics. Two regional P&Ls, an eleven-site network, two system consolidations, one greenfield.
The first is a self-assessment, and readers discount self-assessment automatically. The second is four facts that answer the questions a chair asks in the first thirty seconds.
A profile written for the role you have just left will always read as slightly out of date, however good that role was.
Ten minutes, three columns
Open a blank page and draw three columns. In the first, list the five demands you extracted from those three adverts. In the second, write the sentence in your current record that answers each one, where such a sentence exists.
In the third, name the document that would prove it. The gaps in column two are positioning work. The gaps in column three are evidence work. They are different problems and they are fixed in different ways.
Use three adverts, never one. A single advert is one organisation's internal argument. Three of them, read side by side, is the beginning of a market.