Layoffs are quietly hitting. Here's how to stay ready.
The advice I’m giving every client heading into 2026
Over the past two weeks, two of my coaching clients went through major restructurings.
One reduced headcount by 20%.
The other by 25%.
And two more haven’t faced layoffs yet… but their spidey senses are tingling. They can feel a reduction coming. They don’t know when. But they can feel things shifting.
So lately, I’ve been helping everyone update their resumes.
And the best time to do that, is before you need to. You don’t need to be job hunting to tighten up your story. “Stay ready, so you don’t have to get ready,” right?
But most of the growth resumes I see all share the same problem.
They’re a list of accomplishments and results… with no context. And no narrative. So the person reading it can’t tell if you hit a base hit or actually crushed a home run.
Which is why over the past year, I have watched talented growth leaders apply to roles they were clearly qualified for and still get ignored. It is tempting to blame the competition or the economy. It is even easier to blame yourself.
In most cases, the root issue is that your resume is not helping people understand you.
Why the Old Resume Advice Doesn’t Work Anymore
For years, the standard resume writing guidance pretty straightforward: list your highlights.
That’s why every resume looked like this:
took [thing] from A --> B
increased conversion rate of [thing] Z%
scaled to $XX,XXX MRR
Good stuff you should include for show for sure.
But without the context of the business (size, stage, gtm model) the reader can’t tell if those results are a single, triple, or a home run.
The Hidden Problem Inside Most Growth Resumes
Growth roles look different across companies.
A Growth Marketer inside a PLG SaaS company plays a different game than a growth PM supporting an enterprise inside sales motion.
A Head of Growth at a 40 person startup has a completely different set of responsibilities than a Growth Leader at a 2,000 person scale up.
The same title can mean five different things depending on stage, team structure, traffic volume, and GTM model.
We (the growth community) understand those distinctions because we have lived them. But the recruiter or hiring manager reading your resume probably has not. Many have never done your role. Many assume “growth” means something entirely different. And when they look at your resume without context, they are forced to guess.
That is why strong candidates keep getting overlooked.
A New Playbook for Standing Out in 2026
After working with several growth leaders on their job searches in 2025, I started testing a different way to structure their resumes.
I wanted something that made sense to humans and also played nicely with AI screening tools. I wanted a way to help reviewers understand the full picture without making them work to connect the dots. And I wanted something simple enough that you could apply it in under an hour.
What emerged from that experimentation became the CATER framework.
It provides a structured way to tell your story so that someone scanning your resume understands the game you were playing, the levers you owned, the team around you, and the results you drove. It puts everything in the right order. It reduces guesswork. It makes your experience easier to match.
Here is what each part means in practice.
How the CATER Framework Actually Works
C is Context. This is where you set the scene. In one line, you explain the size of the company, the stage of the business, the GTM model, and where your role sits in the organization. A growth role at a PLG startup is not the same as a growth role inside an enterprise environment. A job in a high volume, fast-feedback business is not the same as a job in a slower, relationship-driven one. When you spell this out, the reader finally understands the environment you operated in and the difficulty level of your work.
A is Accountability and Ownership. Accountability is the small set of KPIs you were judged on. Ownership is the part of the growth model you directly controlled. Together, these explain the scoreboard you played on and the levers you had available. Once people understand this, your results make sense.
T is Team. Every growth role changes depending on the team behind you. If you were a team of one, people can assume you were deep in the work. If you led a small pod, they can assume you were a player coach. If you managed a larger function, they can assume your job centered around hiring, alignment, and influence. One bullet here clears up all that interpretation.
E and R are Execution and Results. This is where you show what you built and what happened. The structure is simple. System you owned, followed by the specific outcome it produced. These bullets are short, clear, and tied directly to the earlier context. And because you have already explained your environment and your ownership, the reader can finally understand the meaning of the results.
This order mirrors how strong hiring managers think.
What To Do Next
If you want to apply this for yourself, start with your most recent role.
Open a blank doc. Then write one bullet for each CATER section. Keep the language simple. Anchor everything in the reality of your environment. Then add three or four clean execution and result bullets underneath. Your goal is not to include every detail. Your goal is to make your story easy to understand.
Here’s an example of what this looks like:
To make this even easier, I created a resume template that follows the entire CATER structure (it’s free and ungated)
It includes space for each section plus examples for different types of growth roles. You can download it and use it as your starting point so you are not staring at a blank page.
If you’re updating your resume, this is also a great moment to tighten the way you operate as a leader.
Two resources that can help you do that:
1) Growth OS - my plug-and-play operating system for running a cross-functional growth team without burning out.
https://deliveringvalue.co/growth-operating-system
2) 1:1 Coaching - for growth leads who want clarity, more impact, and a leadership system that scales with them.
https://deliveringvalue.co/coaching
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(this post originally published on: https://deliveringvalue.co/growth-essays/how-to-write-your-head-of-growth-resume)