The situation
Arvind came to Career Pursuit in February 2025. On paper, he should have been in demand.
Eighteen years of enterprise transformation across pharma, banking, CPG, and retail. MBA from Cardiff. Led $35M global initiatives across 12 countries. Exited a global pharma company the year before, but with a track record like that, he should have been back in market in weeks.
He wasn't. He was stuck. Applying without traction. Confidence eroding. He'd already paid another coaching firm before coming to us, and walked away with nothing.
How was a guy with this resume going nowhere?
The diagnosis
The first deep dive on his resume gave us the answer, but it wasn't the resume.
Eighteen years of transformation work, and Arvind was telling the market, "I'm a project manager."
That's the kind of mismatch that doesn't fix with a better bullet point. It was everywhere. In how he introduced himself in networking conversations. In how he talked about his own experience on our first call. He'd quietly shrunk his career down to a job title.
The downstream effect was bigger than how he sounded. Because he was selling himself small, he was applying small. Lots of volume, no focus. Roles he was overqualified for, roles he was right for, and roles that weren't him at all - all sitting in the same pipeline. The market was getting a confused signal and responding the way markets do: silence.
So no, the resume wasn't the problem. The problem was that a senior transformation leader had lost the plot on his own value, and there was no system around him to keep a real career search moving.
The strategic move
We rebuilt the positioning first. An hour and a half on the resume in our first session, but the work wasn't writing - it was probing. Asking the right questions until he could see his own career clearly enough to talk about it without shrinking it. By the end, he had a "tell me about yourself" pitch that captured his breadth without the jargon.
Then we built the execution engine around him. Tailored applications per role. Hiring manager and TA outreach with personalized emails we'd draft together. Internal referrals through his existing network, which we mapped out properly for the first time. Mock interviews. Business case prep. Post-rejection feedback loops so we'd actually learn from every "no."
By month two, things were moving. Real interviews, at his level.
The setback
In April, he accepted an offer for a Senior Manager role through a contract firm. A few weeks before he was supposed to start, the role was eliminated and the offer was rescinded.
That breaks people. Most candidates lose two or three months recovering from something like that.
He took three or four days. Then he got back to work. The system was already running - applications still in motion, outreach still landing, network still warm. As he put it, "once you're in the system, it's quite quick to get back."
The outcome
Just under four weeks after the rescinded offer, a recruiter from a Tier-1 global bank reached out about a VP, Program Management Advisory & Execution role.
We ran the playbook. Bank-specific initiatives research. Custom interview prep across multiple rounds. Two business case studies built for the panel.
He started August 11, 2025 as VP at the Tier-1 global bank.
Five months from the first session.
