The 1 Job Title Mistake Hiding Executives

Your job title says Vice President of Sales. The one before it says Sales Director.

Both clean. Both standardized. Both exactly what a headhunter would type.

And you still don’t come back in my results.

I build longlists in LinkedIn Recruiter for retained searches. This is the near miss I see most often on senior profiles. The title is right and the profile never surfaces.

Most executives treat the experience section as a record of what the company called them. Get the title tidy and the section is finished.

Wrong.

I lead the global life sciences practice at Mercuri Urval, a top-10 retained firm, with 50+ consultants running senior searches across MedTech, IVD, pharma and biotech. Every one of those searches starts the same way. A client brief, then a string typed into a search bar.

Your headline and your job titles are what that string hits. Together they are the strongest predictor of whether you show up at all.

Nobody asks me to find a VP of Sales.

They ask me to find a VP of Sales for North America, in medical devices, with in vitro diagnostics exposure. The industry is in the brief before a single name is.

So the string I type carries a title, a region, a sector, and usually a sub-sector.

Your title field answers the first one. Most senior profiles leave the other 3 to chance.

Open your profile and go looking for the word that describes your industry.

You will probably find it once, halfway down the About section. Maybe in a bullet under a role. Possibly in the headline, if you wrote a good one.

That word is doing part-time work in the fields that count for the least.

The job title field is the most heavily indexed field on your profile and it carries the heaviest weight in the ranking. On a senior profile it is almost always the one field where the industry never appears.

The first is repetition.

Your industry term already exists somewhere on your profile. Add it to 5 job titles and it goes from 1 mention to 6. Ranking pays attention to how often a term appears across your fields, so 6 beats 1 every time.

The second is weight.

Those 5 new mentions are not sitting in a paragraph that gets skimmed. They are in the field the search reads first and scores highest.

Same word, repeated more often, in the place where each repetition is worth more. Repetition and weight, compounding, inside the box you were treating as a name tag.

That is the whole trick. It costs nothing and it takes 10 minutes.

Write the field like this:

Vice President of Sales, North America, Medical Devices

Title, region, industry. 3 parts, in that order, in every entry.

4 rules travel with it.

1. Use one of the 4 seniority words: Manager, Director, Vice President or Chief. A seniority filter maps to those words. A title without one drops out of every level-filtered search before the industry ever matters.

2. Use common language and no internal jargon. If your company called you Commercial Excellence Lead, the search bar has never heard of you.

3. Put the industry in every entry, past roles included. The repetition is the whole point of doing it.

4. Add the region only when it is real scope. Invented geography gets found out in the first 10 minutes of a call.

The Golden Formula for the headline: Job Title | Geographic Scope | Industry | Sub-Sector | Key Differentiator.

Look at where the industry sits. Right after the title and the geography.

Same order as my search string. Same order as your new job title field.

That is why these 2 fields work as a pair. The headline and the experience titles say the same 4 things, in the same order, in the 2 places that carry the most weight. One says it once. The other says it 5 times.

Less than you think.

I read experience descriptions after I have already decided you are worth a call. They confirm a decision. They do not create one.

The title line creates it.

Findability first, then ranking, then credibility. Your bullets are credibility. They cannot do anything for you inside a search you never entered.

The fix: rewrite every job title as [Seniority Title], [Region], [Industry], and make your headline carry the same terms.

Here is a composite, built from several profiles I have rebuilt. Treat it as anecdotal.

A commercial leader in medical devices. 5 roles on the profile. Every title clean and standardized. Not one of them carrying the word “devices.”

The industry appeared exactly once on the whole profile, in the second paragraph of the About section. Her career was never the problem. Her career was invisible to a sector filter.

We changed nothing about what she had done. We rewrote 5 title lines and 1 headline.

She went from no outreach in 3 months, to 7 recruiter calls in the month after we made the changes.

A standardized job title gets you into the pool.

The industry inside that same title gets you onto the longlist, in your sector, in every search, week after week.

Both halves live in 1 box. It happens to be the box that gets read first and scored hardest.

Your action step: This week, open your experience section and rewrite every job title as [Seniority Title], [Region], [Industry]. Then open your headline and make sure the same industry term is in it. The cut-rule: if a headhunter would not type that exact string into a search bar, it does not belong in the field.

Your next executive role is being typed into a search bar right now, as a title and an industry. Make sure your job title field answers both.

Till next time,

Kristof

P.S. Founding members get two extras free subscribers don’t: I personally review your LinkedIn profile, and you get access to live office hours in the chat twice a week.