The situation
Matt came to Career Pursuit in late 2024. Seven years into a corporate HR career. Senior HR Manager at one of the largest insurance and consulting firms in the world. CHRP-certified. On paper, exactly the trajectory you'd want.
He didn't want to be on it anymore. In his words: "I was feeling a slump in terms of my career progression and forecasting where I was going to be long term. I realized that I wanted more than that. I wanted a complete career shift entirely."
He wanted to leave HR for sales. Not a sideways move - a full functional change. New career, new daily reality, new identity.
How does a senior HR professional with seven years of corporate experience break into sales when every sales hiring manager screens out resumes that don't already have sales on them?
The diagnosis
Most coaches would have looked at his resume and said "we'll add some sales-adjacent language to your bullets and start applying." That doesn't work. Sales hiring managers can spot a career-changer resume in three seconds, and the default response is "next." HR-to-sales is one of the harder functional pivots in the market because the language, the metrics, and the mindset all need to translate at once.
The deeper diagnosis was harder than the resume. Matt had been in HR long enough that HR had become his identity, not just his job. Career changes fail at this level because the person makes the surface change but never claims the new identity. They take the new job but stay mentally in the old career. When the first hard moment hits, they retreat.
In Matt's words: "This was a complete career and quite frankly an identity shift."
The work wasn't to make him sound like a salesperson. The work was to help him become one - in his resume, in his head, in the way he showed up to interviews.
The strategic move
We rebuilt his resume around the sales-relevant parts of his HR career - negotiation, stakeholder management, revenue alignment, C-suite collaboration. The same experience he'd been listing for seven years, but extracted and re-presented in language that sales hiring managers could read.
Then we ran the search like a sales process. In Matt's own words: "The strategy that Alex gave to me was really starting in that sales position before I got hired." Prospect lists of hiring managers. Personalized outreach treating each application like a discovery call. Custom video pitches recorded for specific roles - him explaining, on camera, why his HR background was a sales asset, not a liability. Recruiter networking. Internal referrals through warm contacts.
The other piece was the homework. Sales books. HubSpot certification. Salesforce training. A networking call we set up with a sales professional from our network so Matt could hear, from someone living it, what the day-to-day actually looked like. Most coaches don't push this work. We did, because identity shifts require evidence - and the evidence is the work you put in before anyone pays you to do it.
The outcome
About 10 weeks of work, on a bi-weekly cadence because Matt was still working his HR job through the search. He accepted his first sales role: Account Executive at a B2B SaaS company.
In his words: "I am now in a sales position, my first sales position after working in HR for seven years."
A year later, he'd built a real sales track record - $50K-$70K deal sizes, 43% conversion rate, full-cycle B2B closing experience. Then he made his next move: Account Manager at a market-leading B2B SaaS company in asset management.
The career change he made in 2025 isn't a question anymore. It's a career.
