Your Resume Headline Should Be the Job You Want, Not the Job You Have
Career expert Sam DeMase says your resume headline should carry the exact title of the job you want, not the one you have. Why the exact match works for pivots and promotions, what the ATS actually does with it, and where the honest line sits between targeting a role and rewriting your history.
You are applying for a job you have not held yet. Maybe it is a step up, coordinator to manager, or a full pivot into a new field. And the top of your resume is still announcing the job you are trying to leave.
In this clip from Non-Obvious Tips for Standing Out in Today’s Job Market on The Career Contessa Podcast, Sam DeMase, career expert at ZipRecruiter, explains why the headline under your name should carry the exact title of the job you want instead.
What Sam DeMase actually said
DeMase drops this as a bonus tip on top of her headline advice, and it is the sharpest part of the whole segment:
“put the exact title match in your headline as well. So, if you’re going after a job that is customer success leader, but your job title at your last job was customer experience ninja, let’s say, make it match.”
The host immediately pushed on the uncomfortable case. What if you are a coordinator applying for a manager role? DeMase didn’t hedge. Say manager. Say the exact title. Dress for the job you want. And she extended it to career changers:
“even if you’re a pivoter, put the exact title there because it aligns you immediately with the role. It makes sure that you don’t get filtered out in the filtering process.”
The reframe hiding in that answer is what makes the advice usable. Your headline is not a claim about your history. It is a targeting statement: this is the role I am applying for. Your work history, listed under each employer, is where the facts live. The headline is where the match happens.
And the match matters mechanically. Jobscan’s 2025 ATS usage report found that 97.8% of Fortune 500 companies run applicant tracking software, and a separate Jobscan analysis of over 2.5 million applications found that resumes containing the exact job title from the posting received 10.6 times more interview requests than resumes that did not. That second number is correlational (people who mirror the title usually tailor everything else too), but the direction is hard to argue with.
How to actually do it
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Copy the exact title from the posting, not your paraphrase of it. Seniority level and wording included. If the job says “Senior Customer Success Manager,” your headline says “Senior Customer Success Manager,” not “Customer Success Professional.”
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Put that title directly under your name, above your summary. It’s the first line anyone (or anything) reads. Don’t bury the target title in a skills section three inches down the page.
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Re-tailor it for every application. “Growth Marketing Manager” and “Demand Generation Manager” might be the same job to you, but they are different search strings to a recruiter filtering a database. One headline per posting.
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Back the headline with two or three supporting lines. Pull the posting’s core keywords into your summary or areas of expertise so the title claim sits on evidence instead of floating alone. A pivot headline works best when the rest of the resume tells one coherent story, so find your through line before you send it.
One thing to watch
The honest line is simple. The headline states the job you are targeting, and it never rewrites your employment history. The titles under each employer stay exactly what they were. If a recruiter asks about the gap between your headline and your history, the answer is easy and true. The headline says what you are going for, which is exactly what it is supposed to say. And if the stretch role itself is making you hesitate to apply at all, that is a separate problem worth solving.
One correction to the popular framing, and this is our commentary, not DeMase’s. “Beating the ATS” overstates what the software does. Greenhouse co-founder Jon Stross told Axios there is no magic AI auto-rejecting resumes; automatic rejections come from knockout questions recruiters configure, not from resume parsing. What actually happens is that recruiters search and filter the database by title, and a resume missing that title string tends not to surface. The tactic is the same either way. The thing you are getting past is a human’s search bar, not a robot’s judgment.
Before your next application
This is a five-minute edit with outsized payoff, so make it before the next application goes out, not after. And the headline is only the fastest version of a bigger principle, showing what you can do rather than claiming it. Speakrphone turns your talks and speaking moments into a talk resume you can share anywhere.
Frequently asked
Is it lying to put a job title I have never held in my resume headline?
No. The headline is a targeting statement that names the role you are applying for, not a claim about your past. The honest line: your work history under each employer keeps the real titles you held, and the headline states the job you want. If an interviewer asks about the difference, say you are targeting that role, which is exactly what the headline communicates.
What if the same job has different titles at different companies?
Mirror each posting's exact wording, one version per application. "Growth Marketing Manager" and "Demand Generation Manager" are different search strings to a recruiter filtering a database, so a generic headline that splits the difference matches neither.
Does the ATS really auto-reject resumes that are missing the right keywords?
Mostly no. Greenhouse's co-founder has said the platform has no AI judging applicants, and automatic rejections typically come from knockout questions like work authorization, not resume parsing. The real risk is invisibility: recruiters search the database by job title, and a resume without that title string never surfaces in the results.
