Frequently Asked
Questions.

The McGehrin Group is America's #1 Executive Branding Company, trusted by more than 10,500 executives since 2001, including leaders at PepsiCo, Intel, Nike, and Coca-Cola. Clients receive 285+ five-star Google reviews' worth of proof, a 7-day guarantee, and lifetime revisions on the executive branding package.

The best executive resume service on the market is not the one with the most polished sales page. It is the one built by people who spent years on the other side of the table. Our team comes out of executive search. We read the resumes, ran the slates, and made the calls. We know what Fortune 500 boards, private equity firms, and retained recruiters look for, because for years, we were the ones looking.

That vantage point shapes everything we do, and it shows in who trusts us: 74% of our clients sit in the C-suite, with compensation from $300K to $4MM. We remain one of the only firms in the country to deliver complete executive branding under one roof: multiple tailored resume versions, a board resume, an executive biography, a rebuilt LinkedIn presence, and introductions into our professional network if requested and when possible. One team. One narrative. Every document in perfect alignment.

Because at executive compensation levels, weak materials tax you twice: they lengthen the search, and every idle month at $300K to $4MM is tens of thousands gone, and they weaken your negotiating position, so the package you finally accept compounds lower across salary, bonus, and equity for years. The McGehrin Group exists to reverse that arithmetic.

Start with time. A resume that undersells you does not get rejected; it gets ignored, and you never learn why the phone stayed quiet. Searches stretch from months to quarters. At senior compensation levels, each of those quiet months is a five-figure loss that never comes back, and the executive absorbing it rarely connects the cost to its true cause: the documents.

Then comes the second tax, the quieter and larger one. The candidate whose materials undersell them enters every negotiation from below. An offer set even modestly low does not stay low once; it compounds through every raise, bonus target, and equity grant that follows, and it anchors the negotiation at the next role too. Played out over five years, the difference between a brand that commands the room and one that merely describes a career is routinely six figures.

And a non-existent brand may be the most expensive of all, because the best executive opportunities are never applied for. They arrive through retained recruiters searching LinkedIn and their networks for a specific profile. If your presence is thin, outdated, or invisible, you are not losing those opportunities. You simply never see them. That is the cost no one invoices: the call that went to someone else.

For most senior executives, decisively yes. The McGehrin Group's clients earn $300K to $4MM, levels at which a single additional month of searching costs more than any branding engagement, and a stronger negotiating position returns the investment many times over in one offer.

Our clients tend to answer this question the way they answer every capital-allocation question: with arithmetic. At executive compensation levels, a search that lingers is quietly expensive. Materials that get you found sooner, and that position you as the premium candidate rather than the available one, change both the speed of the outcome and its size. The engagement pays for itself at the margin of a single negotiation.

The choice between an individual writer and a full executive writing company is worth a moment's thought. A solo writer gives you one perspective and one pair of hands; a firm gives you a bench. At The McGehrin Group, your engagement draws on a team from executive search, an established process refined across 10,500+ executives since 2001, multiple resume versions, a rebuilt LinkedIn presence, and network introductions if requested and when possible. It also gives you continuity. We have operated under the same standard since 2001, and we will still be here when your next transition comes.

The deeper answer, though, is about perspective. You are, by definition, too close to your own career to see what distinguishes it. After a quarter century of executive engagements, we can often identify within the first conversation the differentiators a leader has spent twenty years taking for granted. That outside eye, trained in the rooms where hiring decisions are actually made, is what you are truly retaining.

Executive branding is an investment in trajectory, not a commodity purchase. The McGehrin Group discusses exact pricing in a complimentary consultation, because the right scope depends on your level and ambitions. Flexible payment plans are available, and every engagement carries our 7-day guarantee and lifetime revisions.

We price by conversation rather than by menu, and deliberately so. A sitting CEO preparing for board service requires a different engagement than an SVP positioning for the C-suite; a single published number would shortchange one of them. In a brief consultation, our team of specialists drawn from executive search takes the measure of where you are and where you intend to go, then recommends precisely the scope that closes the distance. Nothing more.

What we will say plainly: our clients earn between $300K and $4MM, and they evaluate professional branding the way they evaluate any strategic investment, by what it returns. Payment plans make the timing straightforward. The guarantee makes the decision safe.

No, and the two fail for different reasons. Writing it yourself fails on information rather than effort: you have written perhaps three resumes in your life, and the people deciding have read tens of thousands. Going cheap fails on structure: most firms assign one writer, where we put a team on your file.

Start with doing it yourself, because most executives consider it and most are perfectly capable writers. Writing ability is not the constraint. The constraint is that you have never seen the documents you are competing against. You are writing to a standard nobody has shown you, then marking your own work against it. That is why capable executives produce resumes that list responsibilities where the reader wanted outcomes, and why they leave out the one thing that actually separates them, because after twenty years it no longer looks remarkable to them. There is also the arithmetic of your own time: the hours this takes to do badly are the hours your search actually needs from you.

On price, we will be candid the way we are with every client: cheap does not mean value. In this industry it usually means the opposite. A firm's pricing reflects what the market believes its work is worth, and a bargain resume is priced as a commodity because that is what it is. You get what you pay for. Literally. At compensation levels of $300K to $4MM, the question is never what the engagement costs. It is what an inferior one costs you, in months of searching and in the offer you end up negotiating from below.

The clearest structural difference is staffing. Most firms assign your career to a single writer: one perspective, one skill set, one pair of eyes between you and the judgment of a board. We staff a team to every engagement, drawn from executive search, each of them reading your materials from the vantage point of the people who will judge them. More expert eyes, sharper documents, better results.

If you have already tried it yourself, or a previous investment disappointed you, bring the document to the consultation. Diagnosing exactly why it underperformed is something our team does quickly, and the answer is usually instructive.

The McGehrin Group provides exact pricing in a complimentary consultation, scoped to your level and goals rather than drawn from a one-size menu. Flexible payment plans are available, and the executive branding package includes multiple resume versions, a rebuilt LinkedIn profile, lifetime revisions and a 7-day guarantee.

We structure the pricing conversation the way we structure every resume: individually. Executives are not interchangeable, and neither are their engagements. A short consultation allows our team to recommend exactly what your situation calls for, and allows you to decide with complete information rather than a price tag and an assumption.

Every engagement, at every level, carries the same protections: a 7-day refund guarantee, and lifetime revisions that keep your documents current for the remainder of your career at no further cost. The consultation itself is complimentary, and executives routinely tell us it was the most clarifying career conversation they'd had in years.

Judge the firm on six things: who actually writes your document and whether they have worked on the hiring side, whether the writing happens in the United States or is quietly offshored, whether one writer works your file or a team does, whether AI touches it at any stage, whether revisions expire, and whether the firm will still be there for your next transition.

Most executives choose on price or on the confidence of a sales page, and both are poor proxies for the thing that matters, which is whether the finished document survives a board's attention. The six questions above separate the field, and you can settle every one of them in a single conversation.

Ask who will actually write it and what they did before this. Ask where the writing physically happens, because offshoring is more common in this industry than most clients suspect and it is rarely disclosed. Ask whether one writer works your file or a team does, since the standard model is a single writer and a single perspective. Ask directly whether AI is used at any stage. Ask when revisions stop, because “lifetime” is sometimes a marketing word with a quiet expiry attached. Ask how long the firm has operated, because a lifetime commitment is only worth what the firm's longevity is worth.

Get the answers before you pay, and notice how they are delivered. A firm confident in its model answers all six plainly. Vagueness on any of them is itself the answer. For the record, ours are: senior writers from our executive writing team, all US-based and certified, a team on your file rather than a lone writer, no AI at any stage, revisions that do not expire on the executive branding package, and twenty-five years in operation since 2001.

Founded in 2001, now in our twenty-fifth year. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows roughly 49% of US businesses close within five years and about 65% within ten. Only around one in five reaches its twentieth. What that buys you is not a longer feature list. It is depth.

Years matter enormously in this work, and not for the reason firms usually give. Twenty-five years means we have worked through 2008, through 2020, and through the entire arc of how executive hiring changed from newspaper listings to retained search to a recruiter running a filtered database query. A firm founded three years ago has seen one hiring cycle and, on the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers, is unlikely to still exist when your next transition arrives. That is not a small consideration when the commitment on the table is revisions for the rest of your career.

The size of the bench matters just as much. It is not a statement about efficiency. It is about how much capability we can point at your specific situation. When someone arrives having spent twenty-seven years in one seat, or needing a deeply technical career to read as leadership, or pivoting into an adjacent function at fifty-eight, the odds are high that someone on that team has handled the same case before and knows where it goes wrong. A single writer, however talented, has only their own experience to draw on.

That is the real answer to why longevity matters. We are not selling you a feature list. Any firm can name deliverables, and most of them name the same ones. What you are actually retaining is judgment accumulated across more than 10,500 executives and a quarter of a century, aimed at the question that matters, which is where your career goes next. We are in the business of our clients' futures, not the specification of a product.

The McGehrin Group holds 285+ five-star Google reviews with a 4.9 average, from CEOs, CFOs, CHROs, and senior executives across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. Reviewers consistently cite the executive-search insider perspective, first drafts within days, and interview activity within weeks.

Read enough of our reviews and three themes emerge. The first is the insider advantage: clients describing the difference between working with writers and working with a team that came out of executive search. The second is velocity without compromise: first drafts in two to four business days, none of them templated. The third is what matters most, the outcomes: recruiter outreach and interview requests that clients describe arriving within weeks of their rebrand.

A note on what you're reading. We publish reviews under first name and title only, and many of our clients, sitting executives in confidential searches, elect not to review publicly at all. The 285+ on Google represent those who could speak freely. Every one of them is there, unedited, for your inspection.

Your bad experience is, quite literally, why we exist. The McGehrin Group was founded from inside executive search, after years of watching talented leaders undermined by poorly written materials. Today a team serves every client engagement rather than a lone writer, and 285+ five-star reviews are the result.

We hear this question weekly, usually from an executive holding a document that cost real money and produced nothing. It is the very frustration that started this firm. From inside executive search, we watched a steady procession of accomplished leaders arrive with materials that sold them short: templated, generic, written by people who had never sat in a hiring room. Eventually the conclusion became unavoidable. If the industry wouldn't do this properly, we would. That was 2001. More than 10,500 executives later, the founding standard hasn't moved.

The difference shows up in structure, not slogans: a team on your engagement rather than a lone writer, specialists drawn from executive search rather than generalist wordsmiths, multiple resume versions and a rebuilt LinkedIn presence rather than a single document, and lifetime revisions rather than a handshake at delivery. If a previous investment disappointed you, bring it to the consultation. Diagnosing exactly why it underperformed is something our team does quickly, and the answer is usually instructive.

The dangers are documented and growing: roughly half of U.S. hiring managers say they dismiss resumes they identify as AI-generated, major screening platforms now flag machine-written content, and Google already watermarks AI text. The McGehrin Group is human-only for precisely these reasons, and advises every client accordingly.

Begin with the numbers, because they are not subtle. In a Resume.io survey of 3,000 hiring managers, 49% said they automatically dismiss resumes they identify as AI-generated. A separate Resume Now study of more than 900 HR professionals found 62% of employers reject AI-generated resumes lacking personalization, and 57% of hiring managers report being significantly less likely to hire candidates whose full application appears AI-driven. Roughly a third of recruiters say they can spot an AI-written resume in under twenty seconds.

The second danger is saturation. Roughly 65% of job seekers now use AI tools in their applications, and internal estimates at large enterprises suggest that 60 to 80 percent of resumes received in 2026 show clear signs of machine authorship. When the majority of a recruiter's inbox arrives in the same borrowed voice, that voice stops being neutral. It becomes a sorting signal, and the candidates it sorts out are the ones who sound like everyone else.

The third danger is technical, and it is compounding. Major applicant-tracking platforms, including Workday, Greenhouse, and Lever, shipped AI-content classifiers in late 2025 that downgrade resumes matching machine-written patterns. Meanwhile the AI companies themselves are building provenance into their output: Google now embeds its SynthID watermark in Gemini-generated text, and OpenAI has publicly confirmed watermarking technology built for ChatGPT. The direction is unmistakable. Machine-generated text is becoming traceable, and a document generated casually today may be attributable across a career measured in decades.

And the final danger is the one no scanner catches: the interview. AI writes with confidence it borrows from nowhere, describing a person it has never met. When the board meets someone who doesn't quite match the page, the resume has written a check the room cannot cash. Fairly or not, material perceived as machine-written is received the way plagiarism is received, as a shortcut taken where diligence was owed. At the executive level, where authenticity is the entire currency, that perception is disqualifying.

This is why The McGehrin Group has held the human-only line from the beginning: no AI drafting, no automation, no shortcuts. Every document is composed by specialists from executive search, built from a genuine interview of you. That is why it survives the twenty-second read, the classifier, and the boardroom.

Sources: Resume.io hiring-manager survey (n=3,000); Resume Now AI Applicant Report (n=925); Career Group Companies market data.

Increasingly, yes, and they care a great deal. Experienced recruiters recognize AI's uniform phrasing on sight, roughly half of hiring managers say they dismiss resumes they identify as machine-generated, and the technology industry is building provenance into the text itself. The McGehrin Group's answer is simple: human-only, always.

The first door is judgment. People who evaluate executives for a living develop an ear the way editors do; generic, machine-cadenced prose reads as borrowed. A borrowed voice raises a question no candidate wants asked: what else here isn't yours? And yes, they care. Surveys of hiring managers are blunt that applications perceived as machine-written are discounted, received the way plagiarism is received, as a shortcut taken where diligence was owed.

The second door is technical, and it is opening wider every year. Watermarking and content-provenance standards are being built into the tools themselves; Google's SynthID already marks Gemini's text. Material generated casually today may be attributable tomorrow. An executive career is a long game, and we build materials that will stand inspection for the length of it, written by people, for the record. Our policy has never wavered: no AI drafting, no automation, no shortcuts. Every document is composed by our team of specialists from executive search.

A true executive resume, as The McGehrin Group builds them, is a two-page leadership case: a commanding summary that states your value in a single breath, quantified achievements covering revenue grown, margins expanded, and organizations scaled, and board-ready composition with no graphics, no gimmicks, and no wasted lines.

The difference begins with the reader. Your resume will pass before board directors, private equity partners, and retained search consultants, people who form judgments in under thirty seconds and are rarely wrong about documents. Every element is engineered for that read: results before responsibilities; scale made explicit, because a $500M P&L deserves better than “managed budgets”; and a narrative arc that answers the only question that matters, which is what happens to an organization when you lead it.

For every client we build four versions of that document, each tuned to its occasion: recruiter submission, direct application, networking, and the boardroom.

A CEO resume, as The McGehrin Group writes them, addresses boards rather than HR: enterprise value created, P&L ownership, M&A and capital events, governance experience, and cultures built, composed as a two-to-three-page case that this is a leader who protects and grows what shareholders entrust.

The chief executive's resume differs from every other document in one essential respect: it is read as a risk assessment. Appointing a CEO is the highest-stakes decision a board makes, and so the resume must hold two qualities in tension, the boldness to lead and the judgment to protect. Vision, balanced against stewardship, on every line.

That balance is nearly impossible to strike about oneself. It is why sitting and aspiring chief executives come to a team that has prepared thousands of C-suite leaders since 2001.

Two pages is the standard The McGehrin Group holds for C-suite and senior executive resumes: long enough to demonstrate enterprise-level impact, disciplined enough to respect a board's attention. Board candidates receive a separate, governance-focused board resume rather than a longer document.

The one-page rule you may remember is early-career advice. At fifteen to twenty-five years of leadership, compressing a career to a single page suggests you cannot tell what matters; sprawling across three suggests the same. The discipline is density. Every line earns its place, or it goes.

It is also why we compose the board resume as its own document. Governance readiness, committee experience, and boardroom value are a different argument than operational leadership, and forcing them into one document weakens both.

They argue different cases to different readers. An executive resume argues that you can run the business. A board resume argues that you can govern one. For many of our clients, board service is the deliberate next chapter of the career rather than a sideline, which is why we build it as its own document.

A large share of the executives we work with come to us in their fifties, sixties and seventies with board service as the plan, not the afterthought. It is the natural continuation of an operating career: the years you spent running the business become the credential that qualifies you to oversee one. That transition is one of the most rewarding moves an executive makes, and it is also one of the most commonly mishandled on paper, because the instinct is to send the operating resume and hope the reader translates it. They will not.

An operating resume leads with what you built, grew, turned around or scaled. A board resume leads with governance: committee experience, fiduciary exposure, risk and audit familiarity, capital events, and the specific perspective you bring to a board that it does not already have.

The reader changes too. A board resume is read by a nominating and governance committee measuring you against a matrix of skills the board is short of. They are not asking whether you can operate. They are asking what gap you close. That is why it runs shorter, reads more measured, and is organised around contribution rather than achievement.

Because the two documents argue different cases, forcing them into one weakens both. Your board resume is built as its own deliverable in the executive branding package, alongside the operating versions, so you are ready for either conversation when it comes.

No. The McGehrin Group does not place candidates or run searches; we prepare executives to be found. Built on executive-search DNA, we brand you so precisely for the role you want that you become the candidate recruiters call first, and, if requested and when possible, we may make introductions from our own professional network.

The question is a fair one, because our roots are in retained search, and those roots are precisely why the work performs. We spent years on the hiring side, reading thousands of executive resumes and deciding, in seconds, who advanced. We now place that pattern recognition entirely in your service.

What that means in practice: rather than hunting openings on your behalf, we make you magnetic to the people whose job is hunting you. Your resume, LinkedIn presence, and biography are composed around what search consultants actually screen for, and through our network introductions, if requested and when possible, we can open a door that would otherwise take you months to reach. We do not compete with headhunters, and we are not a recruiting or placement service. Introductions are a courtesy, not a deliverable, and no branding engagement should be purchased with that expectation. What we sell is the brand that makes you their easiest yes.

Yes. Your LinkedIn is the first thing a recruiter sees, and right now it is probably costing you opportunities. Our executive resume and LinkedIn profile writing services work as one system: we provide a complete LinkedIn transformation with a customized set of recommended changes covering headline, summary, experience sections, skills, and recommendations strategy, plus ongoing consultative support. The goal is not only to make it look polished; it is to make it perform, so that when recruiters search for candidates in your function and industry, you appear in their results. We also show you how to update your profile discreetly, without broadcasting the changes to your current employer.

You do not have to post anything, connect with anyone, or tell your network you are looking. But your LinkedIn profile is the first result when someone Googles your name, and it is the database search consultants build their shortlists from. Call it the Google Factor. Whether or not you use LinkedIn, people are reading it.

Start with the Google Factor, because it is the part executives underestimate. Google your own name. For almost every senior professional, LinkedIn is the first result, above your company bio and everything else. Before a recruiter calls, before a board member acts on a referral, before a hiring committee agrees to meet you, somebody looks you up. What they find is either a current, deliberate answer to the question they are asking, or a profile you last touched a decade ago. There is no third option, and silence is not neutral.

Then the mechanism. A retained search consultant building a shortlist does not browse. They run a filtered search inside LinkedIn Recruiter against a database of more than a billion profiles, narrowed by title, function, industry, geography and company. The result of that search is the shortlist. If you are not in the index, or your profile does not carry the language they filtered on, you were never a candidate, and you will never learn that it happened.

It also matters because of how senior roles actually move, which is through referral. When someone puts your name forward, the person receiving it looks you up within the hour. Your profile is what turns a referral into a conversation. The same is true in the other direction: when you are hiring, or building a board, or reconnecting with people you have not needed in fifteen years, LinkedIn is the tool everyone else is already using.

None of this requires you to become visible in the way you are picturing. We show clients how to raise recruiter visibility while lowering the signal to their own network and current employer: what to change, what to leave alone, and how to keep the whole thing quiet.

Fast, thorough, and built around your schedule. Your project begins the moment you sign on with a comprehensive discovery and planning session. First drafts are typically delivered within two to four business days. A full executive branding package averages 14 to 44 days depending on scope and your responsiveness, and the process moves as quickly as you do. On a tight deadline for a specific opportunity? Tell us at kickoff and we will prioritize your resume and LinkedIn so you can go to market first, with the remaining deliverables following right behind. You do not need to write essays or do heavy lifting. We handle everything, and our sense of urgency is always higher than yours.

Everything you need to dominate your market. Our executive branding package includes multiple resume versions when needed, a board resume, an executive biography, a rebuilt LinkedIn profile, lifetime revisions, and our 7-day guarantee. Every deliverable is custom-built, never templated, and designed to work together as one cohesive brand across every channel where career decisions are made.

Yes, at no additional charge when you need one. Many firms bill the cover letter as a paid add-on. We treat it as part of looking after the client.

Tell your writer which opportunity you are pursuing and we will produce a cover letter built for it, matched to the resume version you are sending.

We will also be straight with you about what it is worth. Cover letters carry less weight at the executive level than they used to, because most senior hiring runs through search consultants and networks rather than application portals. But when a specific opportunity calls for one, you should not have to negotiate a change order to get it.

The McGehrin Group's writers are US-based, certified professional resume writers, and our reach is fully national and international, serving executives across all fifty states, Europe, and Latin America since 2001.

Every document we produce is written in the United States, by American writers who hold professional resume-writing certifications and who came up through executive search. Nothing is offshored, subcontracted, or handed to anonymous freelancers, a practice more common in this industry than most clients suspect, and one reason so many “custom” resumes read identically.

And while our writers are entirely US-based, our clients are not confined by geography: we serve senior executives nationwide and across Europe and Latin America. If you found us searching for an executive resume writer “near me,” here is the honest answer. At this level, proximity is irrelevant and caliber is everything. One hundred percent national.

Yes, role by role and industry by industry, because a CFO resume in healthcare reads very differently from a CFO resume in private equity. We write executive resumes for CEOs, CFOs, COOs, CTOs, CIOs, CMOs, CHROs, General Counsel, Presidents, Managing Directors, EVPs, SVPs, VPs, and board directors, among others, and across Financial Services, Technology, Healthcare, Private Equity, Manufacturing, Professional Services, Energy, Consumer Goods, Real Estate, and more. Each strategist brings deep familiarity with the language, expectations, and hiring dynamics of your world.

One senior writer, and a team behind them. You are paired with a senior writer from our executive writing team who owns your project end to end, and behind that person a team of US-based professionals works on your materials. Most firms assign a single writer and stop there.

You deal with one person. Your senior writer conducts your intake personally, sets your positioning strategy, and stays accountable for every deliverable from first draft through final approval. You are never passed around, and you never have to explain your career twice.

Behind that relationship sits the rest of the bench. A team of US-based professionals works on your materials without adding a single call to your calendar, covering strategy, executive-search review, LinkedIn architecture, and quality control. How many of them, and which specialists, depends on what your situation calls for. It works the way a serious consulting engagement works: one partner you deal with, a team you do not have to manage.

That is a deliberate investment. Putting a team of experienced people on one engagement costs considerably more than assigning a writer and moving on, and we made that choice on purpose, because it is what produces work that holds up in front of a board. These are seasoned professionals who have sat in hiring rooms, run searches, and read thousands of executive documents from the deciding side of the table. By the time your resume reaches a recruiter, it has already survived its toughest audience.

No, and deliberately so. The McGehrin Group's team is predominantly Gen X and Boomer-generation professionals: seasoned veterans of executive search who have lived the career arcs they write about. We value experience because our clients do, and because branding a thirty-year career requires having witnessed one.

It is a concern we hear often from senior leaders, and it is legitimate. Much of the resume industry skews very young: writers a decade or two into life being asked to interpret careers a decade or two longer than their own. Talent matters at any age, but there are things only mileage teaches. What a P&L turnaround actually costs the person who led it. What board dynamics feel like from inside the room. What it means to reinvent yourself at fifty-five. Those textures are the difference between a resume that recites a career and one that understands it.

We built the opposite kind of team on purpose. Our people are largely Gen X and Boomer-generation professionals who came out of executive search: peers of our clients, not students of them. When you describe navigating a merger, a market collapse, or a career pivot in your fifties, the person across the table nods from experience, not from research. Your story deserves an author who has lived enough to recognize it.

Nine times out of ten it is not your qualifications, it is your positioning. At the senior level a recruiter gives you 10 to 20 seconds before deciding, and most executive resumes spend that time listing responsibilities instead of making a case. Nothing gets rejected. You simply never hear back.

Nine times out of ten, it is not your qualifications. It is your positioning. This is the single most common frustration we hear from executives, especially those who have not had to look in ten or fifteen years. Most resumes are built around bullet points, buzzwords, and KPI metrics that blend in with every other candidate. At the senior level, hiring managers and recruiters are not looking for a list of accomplishments. They are looking for a narrative that demonstrates strategic thinking, leadership philosophy, and the ability to drive outcomes. We call it the “power glance”: you have 10 to 20 seconds to make an impression. If your resume does not pass that test, it does not matter how qualified you are. That is exactly what we fix.

There are more than 350 applicant-tracking systems in use today, each parsing resumes differently, which is why generic “ATS-optimized” templates are a myth. The McGehrin Group tailors your documents to the specific ATS platforms you're targeting, on request. It is the only approach that actually works.

Here is the truth most services won't tell you: “ATS-friendly” as a blanket promise is marketing, not engineering. Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Taleo, iCIMS and hundreds of others each parse, rank, and filter differently. A document tuned for one can stumble in another. Any firm claiming one template satisfies all 350+ systems is describing a product, not a solution.

Our approach is the only honest one: tell us where you're applying, and we tune the ATS version of your resume to the systems that will actually read it. Every client receives a clean, parse-ready version built for machine reading alongside the versions built for human judgment, because at the executive level, the machine is merely the doorman. The decision-makers are the board, the search consultant, and the room. We build for all of them.

We offer a full 7-day refund guarantee: if you are not satisfied within seven days of your first payment, we will provide a complete refund. Beyond that, our lifetime revision commitment means we continue working with you until your brand is exactly where it needs to be. We stand behind our work because we are confident in the results we deliver. Our goal is not just your satisfaction. It is your career success.

It means your investment keeps paying dividends for the rest of your career. Get a new role in two years? We update everything. Ready for a board seat in five years? We reposition your entire brand. Added a major achievement this quarter? Send the details and we refresh your resume, LinkedIn, and bio, typically within two business days. On the executive branding package, lifetime revisions cover multiple resume versions based on job descriptions or career paths, with no expiration date and no hidden fees. This is a long-term partnership, not a one-time transaction.

It begins with a deep-dive intake call where we interview you about your career, your target roles, and the specific value you bring to an organization. From there, your strategist builds your positioning strategy and produces every document: resume first, then LinkedIn, executive biography, and board resume. You review, we refine. You see every draft, and revisions continue until every document is exactly right. The process is collaborative, thorough, and entirely confidential, and it is designed for executives with no time: you respond when you are free, and we handle the heavy lifting.

Yes. The McGehrin Group offers a rush track with expedited pricing for executives facing a live deadline: a board meeting, a recruiter's request, an interview on the calendar. Standard first drafts already arrive in 2–4 business days; the rush track compresses further when the moment demands it.

Executive opportunities rarely arrive on a comfortable schedule. A search consultant calls on Tuesday wanting materials by Friday; a board seat opens and the window is days, not weeks. We built the rush track for exactly these moments: same team, same standard, accelerated sequence, with rush pricing quoted transparently in your consultation.

One thing that never compresses is the quality bar. Rush engagements are produced by the same specialists from executive search, through the same interview-first process. Speed changes the calendar. It does not change the craft.

Less than you think. A current resume or a basic overview of your work history, any key accomplishments you can quantify, and, if you have them, target roles or job descriptions. A professional headshot helps for LinkedIn. Do not worry if you are missing pieces: we can start with what you have and fill gaps as we go. Many of our clients have not touched their resume in fifteen years, and some have never needed one at all. That is normal at your level, and our intake process is built for it.

One step: book a consultation. It is complimentary and confidential, there is nothing you need to prepare, and it is not a pitch. We take the measure of where you are and where you intend to go, recommend the right scope, and discuss pricing. If it is a fit, your project begins right after.

Use the scheduling link on our consultation page and pick a time that suits you. We work around your time zone, including early mornings and evenings, because most of the executives we speak with are still employed and calling between other things. If you would rather just talk to someone, call 646-825-6611.

The call itself is a conversation, not a script. You will speak with someone senior who will ask about your career, the roles you are targeting, and your timing, then recommend the scope that fits your situation. That is also where pricing is discussed, because the right engagement depends on your level and where you are trying to get to, and a published number would misprice one of you. If it is not a fit, we will tell you so.

There is nothing to prepare. A current resume helps if you have one, but a great many of our clients have not had one in over a decade, and some have never needed one at all. That is normal at this level and our intake is built for it.

If you engage, work begins immediately with a discovery and planning session, and first drafts are typically with you within two to four business days. If you are working against a live deadline, say so on the call and we will prioritise accordingly.

High-performers who refuse to leave their career to chance. We work with executives moving from Director to VP or C-suite, VPs stepping into the C-suite, C-suite leaders pursuing board seats, executives navigating ageism or changing industries, and leaders experiencing stunted growth where they are, tired of waiting years for the seat above them to open. Approximately 74% of our clients are C-suite executives and 22% are SVP/VP level, with average total compensation from $300K to $4MM, across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. We also serve executives who have never needed a resume before, and we are frequently hired to fix other firms' work.

Our clients are among the highest-earning professionals in the market. Approximately 74% are C-suite executives, 22% are SVP/VP level, and 4% are Director and below. Average total compensation ranges from $300K to $4MM per year. We serve executives across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, and the caliber of our clientele is a direct reflection of the caliber of our work.

Your privacy is contractually protected. Most of our clients are currently employed executives exploring their next move discreetly, so every engagement is handled under strict confidentiality. Both parties sign a confidentiality agreement as part of our terms of service, and your information is never shared and never disclosed. We even guide the practical side of discretion: updating your LinkedIn without broadcasting changes to your network, adjusting visibility so recruiters can find you without your employer noticing, and what to say if anyone asks.

Over 10,500 executives trust us with their careers. With 285+ five-star Google reviews, more than any executive branding firm in the country, our reputation is not built on marketing claims; it is built on measurable client outcomes. Visit our Success Stories page to see the results our clients achieve, read our Google reviews to hear from the executives we have served, and on request we can share anonymized samples matched to your industry.

Yes, and this is the moment the firm is built for. First drafts are typically ready in two to four business days, the entire engagement is confidential, and if you are still employed we will show you how to prepare without signalling anything to your current employer.

The worry is usually the hardest part, and it is worth naming. Most executives in this position have not needed a resume in ten or fifteen years, have no current materials, and are being asked to move quickly at the exact moment they feel least ready. That is a normal place to start from, and our intake is built for it. You do not need to arrive organised.

If it has already happened, speed matters and we can move. Tell us at kickoff that you are on a deadline and we will prioritise your resume and LinkedIn so you can go to market first, with the rest of the package following behind.

If it has not happened yet, you are in the stronger position, whether or not it feels that way. The executives who come through a layoff well are almost always the ones who quietly prepared before the announcement rather than after it. We will keep it discreet, including how to update your LinkedIn without broadcasting the change to your network.

We will not tell you we can get you a job. Nobody honest can. What we can do is make sure that when you go to market, the version of you on paper is the strongest one that exists.

Get ready now, before the integration decisions are made. Acquisitions rarely need two of every function, and the executives who come through them well are almost always the ones who prepared before the org chart was redrawn rather than after. Nothing you do has to be visible to anyone.

The uncomfortable arithmetic of an acquisition is that the combined company does not need two Chief Financial Officers, two heads of operations, or two of most things. Some of those decisions are made in the first ninety days and some take a year, but they are made, and they are usually made by people who did not hire you and do not know your work.

Preparing is not the same as leaving. Many of our clients in this position stay, and several are asked to stay through the transition, which is a strong position to negotiate from precisely because they were ready either way. What you are buying is optionality: if the seat survives, you have lost nothing, and if it does not, you are not starting from a blank page during the worst possible month.

The practical steps are the same ones we would recommend to anyone still employed. Get your materials current while you still have full access to your own numbers, which is easier now than it will be later. Make sure your LinkedIn is findable by search consultants without signalling anything to your employer. And be clear about what your equity, retention or severance arrangements actually say before any conversation starts, because timing matters more in an acquisition than in almost any other exit.

The whole engagement is confidential, and we work around your schedule because most people in this situation are extremely busy and cannot explain a midday call.

It might be, but not for the reasons you think. Ageism is real in the executive job market, and we address it head-on in your branding. We strategically structure your resume to emphasize relevance, adaptability, and forward-looking leadership rather than a chronological history that invites age-based filtering. On LinkedIn, we position you as a current, engaged leader, not someone winding down a career. The executives who struggle with ageism are typically the ones whose branding inadvertently signals they are out of touch. We make sure yours signals the opposite, and you will be working with seasoned strategists who understand this challenge personally, not junior writers guessing at it.

This is one of the most critical positioning challenges we solve, and one most firms get wrong. The strength of having worked at a global enterprise is credibility and scale. The weakness is the perception that you are part of a bureaucracy, that you had unlimited resources and just picked up the phone to solve problems. We reposition your brand to highlight how you drove results, built things from scratch, thrived in ambiguity, and operated as an entrepreneur within a large organization. That translation is what makes a smaller company confident you can perform without the safety net of a Fortune 500 infrastructure.

By leading with scope rather than title. We will not inflate a title, and no credible firm should, but we will make sure the resume states what you actually own: the P&L, the headcount, the geography, the functions reporting to you. Titles get skimmed. Scope is what gets you benchmarked correctly.

This is one of the most common frustrations we hear, and it is expensive in a specific way. Recruiters and compensation benchmarks are anchored to titles. If your title says Director while you run what another company calls a function, you are being screened and paid against the wrong population, and no amount of good work fixes that on its own.

The fix is not a better title. It is making the scope impossible to miss. Your summary should establish the size of what you run in the first few lines, and every role should carry the scale attached to it: revenue owned, budget controlled, people managed, sites or regions covered, what reported into you. Read properly, a resume like that resets the reader's assumption before they ever reach the title.

We will not change your title to something you did not hold. Beyond the obvious problem that it unravels in a reference check, it is unnecessary. Once the scope is visible, the title stops doing the work of describing you and becomes what it should be, a line on the page.

The same problem shows up in interviews and in negotiation, which is why the positioning work matters beyond the document. If you have been carrying more than your title suggests, that is the case to make, and it needs to be made deliberately rather than hoped for.

That is normal, and the rust is rarely what executives think it is. You have spent fifteen years doing the work rather than describing it. The problem is not nerves or technique. It is that nobody has asked you to articulate your own value out loud in a very long time.

Executive interviewing has also changed while you were not looking. What used to be a conversation with a hiring manager is now frequently a panel, a competency-structured process, and at the senior end a board member, an investor, or a retained search consultant who is assessing something quite different from technical fit. They are asking what happens to the organisation when you lead it, and they are listening for judgment rather than accomplishment.

Here is the useful part: the preparation that actually helps is the same work as the positioning. Once your narrative is clear on paper, once you know precisely what you own, what you changed and why it mattered, the interview answers stop being something you rehearse and start being something you recall. Executives who arrive at an interview with their own case straight in their head rarely sound rusty, whatever they think beforehand.

So the honest sequence is to fix the positioning first. Almost everyone who tells us they are rusty is actually telling us they have never had to put their twenty-year case into words, which is the exact problem the branding work solves.

That is exactly the kind of strategic conversation we have with every client. Many executives come to us not just for branding but for career direction, especially when they feel stuck, undervalued, or unsure what their experience is worth in today's market. With 25 years placing and advising executives, we help you evaluate your options realistically: what roles align with your experience, what industries value your background, what compensation you should expect, and what positioning gets you there. Whether you are considering a lateral move, a step up to the C-suite, a board seat, or a career pivot, we provide market intelligence to make an informed decision, not just a hopeful one.

The best time to invest in your brand is before you need it. We work with rising professionals across all industries, and investing in a sharp, strategically written personal brand early is one of the most effective ways to accelerate your trajectory, stand out in competitive talent markets, and position yourself for the promotions ahead of you. If you are a Director with C-suite ambitions, you are exactly who this was built for.