The situation
Suzanne came to Career Pursuit in September 2025. She'd been searching on her own for over seven months and was getting nothing back. 20+ years in senior marketing. Led $500M+ in residential real estate marketing across her career. Managed $5M annual budgets. Ran teams of 15+. Senior Account Director at one of the GTA's top real estate marketing agencies.
She was applying. She wasn't hearing back. Not even rejections - just silence. In her words: "I'd been trying on my own for over seven months and I was not getting any results. The traditional way of applying for jobs has changed. My strategy wasn't working anymore."
How does a senior marketing leader with this track record get ignored by the market for seven months?
The diagnosis
Most coaches would have looked at her resume and started rewriting bullets. We started somewhere else: the market she was applying into.
Suzanne's career was built in residential real estate marketing. The problem in late 2025 wasn't her - it was the industry. The GTA residential real estate market had collapsed. Hiring had frozen. Agencies were laying off, not posting. The roles she was qualified for didn't exist anymore. So no matter how good her resume was, she was applying into a market that wasn't hiring.
The fix wasn't a better bullet point. The fix was a different market.
That's a different problem than most career coaches will name out loud, because most coaches help you compete harder in the market you're already in. The honest diagnosis here was that competing harder wasn't going to work. We needed to find a market that was actually hiring, that wanted what she could do, and put her there.
The strategic move
We started with what she was actually good at, separated from the industry she'd done it in. Budget ownership. Multi-channel campaign execution. Team leadership. Performance reporting. Agency-side client management. Skills that are valuable in every industry - if the resume tells the right story.
Then we did the market analysis. Which industries were hiring marketing leadership? Where was capital actually moving? EdTech had significant government funding flowing in. B2B tech was investing in marketing again. A robotics and engineering education company in the GTA sat at the intersection of both, and they were growing. We targeted them specifically.
The execution work followed: three resume tiers calibrated for different lanes, personalized outreach to hiring managers, network mapping for warm referrals, mock interviews built around the question every out-of-vertical hiring manager asks: "you've only worked in real estate, can you do this here?" We answered that question proactively, in the resume, in outreach, and in the room.
Suzanne on the resume work: "Most people in my interviews regarding my resume said I had a great resume. They didn't have to ask me about my experience because my resume said everything already."
The outcome
In under six weeks, Suzanne had two offers. One was the robotics and engineering education company we'd specifically targeted - Marketing Communications Manager. Out of residential real estate, into a growing industry, in a senior in-house role. The other was a senior agency role she withdrew from once the in-house offer came through. She picked the one she actually wanted.
In her words: "Going into this I really wanted a job not in my current industry. It's really hard especially at my age and my stage in life to change industry. That's been a goal for me for the last five years. The fact that we were able to do that is amazing."
Six weeks from the first session. The market is moving fast. Industries are contracting and expanding faster than they used to. Building a real career now means being agile - knowing when to leave a market and where to go next. That's the work.
