Leo Burnett: Your CV must have a character

I founded the Leo Burnett agency in Chicago in 1935, in the middle of a crisis. Seventy thousand in debt, a bowl of apples on the desk — for guests. Those apples became the company's symbol, and the ground of my philosophy of character. Advertising sells not the product but the human story behind it.

In 1954 Phillip Morris came to the table. Marlboro cigarettes had been sold to women — filtered, slim, with a red filter so lipstick wouldn't show. The market was shrinking. They asked me: what now? We need to sell to men.

I thought for a week. Then I sat at the office and put one sentence on the table: "Who is the most masculine man?" We wrote down construction workers. Marines. Cops. Highway truckers. Then cowboys. I crossed everything out and kept the cowboy.

That day the Marlboro Man was born. He was not a single man — he was an archetype of solitary America. Over the years different men played him, all the same character. People who smoked Marlboros weren't buying tobacco — they became a man. That campaign ran 40 years and made Marlboro the best-selling brand in the world.

What is a CV's Marlboro Man?

Young job-seekers come to me with their CVs. Most resemble pre-1953 Marlboro ads: filtered, slim, hoping everyone will love them. "Solution- oriented, dynamic, talented." I can't tell which one is who. Every one of them a cowboyless ad.

I ask them: "If someone who has known you for 30 years described you in one sentence, what would they say?" The first answer is usually an adjective: "hard-working", "reliable." Trash. The second is a job title: "frontend developer." Trash. The third one arrives: "The guy who always takes on the bad account no team wants." That is an archetype. "The one who can change the company's culture in the first year." Another. "The engineer who survived seven different CTOs and kept the product alive." A third.

Once you find the archetype, your CV undergoes a transformation. Every line falls into orbit around that character. As the recruiter reads, a picture forms in their mind. The picture has a name — like the Marlboro Man.

Five archetypes that work in the tech market

Five archetypes I have seen repeatedly. All real. All write CVs that shine when stated:

• The Firefighter. The one who steps in when the company is in crisis. Writes the postmortem alone. The calmest person at the all-hands meeting where everyone is alarmed. "Led root-cause analysis on three production outages within 24 hours each. Twice wrote the post-incident reviews the team didn't feel responsible for but were necessary."
• The Culture Builder. The one who joined not knowing who said what in any meeting, and within six months had set the rhythm of those meetings. "Started a weekly demo session in my first six months — became the only meeting where product met engineering. Eighteen months later seven people had launched it, and it had spread across the whole company."
• The Quiet Closer. The one who blows past quota in a cool tone. Can ask for a referral on the way out without breaking sweat. "Quota at 120-140% for three straight years without writing a single real CRM note. Learned that sales happens outside the office, early."
• The Translator. The bridge between two worlds — engineering and product, product and sales, sales and operations. "For two years I distilled customer requests onto a single page for the engineering team. Triage time dropped from four hours to forty minutes a week."
• The Reborn. The one who made a career change at high cost. "At 32 I went from being a bank manager to writing code. First two years: 70-hour weeks. Third year: staff engineer. Then: returning to the same bank as a consultant."

How do I find my archetype?

To find the Marlboro Man I spent a week alone in the office. The same discipline is required of you. Four questions:

• "What was I to the company?" When former colleagues introduce you to a new hire, what is the single trait they'll mention? "The data person", "the team gatherer", "the first to bring the bad news." That single sentence is the seed of the archetype.
• "Which responsibilities always fell to me?" Your official title is X, but you keep being handed the same Y at every company. Firefighting, preparing the slides, helping the new person, taking the night calls. The unofficial-but-repeated role is the archetype.
• "What word would my 50-year-old self use for my 30-year- old self?" The answer often shows the unchanging side of your character. "Persistent." "Calmly anxious." "Quick to enter and quick to leave the wrong path." Find the plainest word for it.
• "If a single image described me, what would it be?"The Marlboro Man was a cowboy on a horse. What image is yours? A person sitting alone in front of an empty whiteboard before dawn? A person beside a tea kettle, keeping a notebook? Images come before words.

How do I weave the archetype into a CV?

In Marlboro ads the cowboy never said "I am a cowboy." He showed it. He was on a horse. The wind was in his hair. The cigarette in his lip. Same with your CV. Don't write "I am the Firefighter" — show it.

Three techniques:

• The opening paragraph carries the archetype without naming it. "In eight years of career I managed nine major outages across three production environments — every post- incident review was mine." No "Firefighter" mentioned, yet every line smells of one.
• Repeated motifs. The Marlboro Man's horse, his hat, the midday sun — those images returned. In a CV they translate to a plain repetition of keywords: "incident", "postmortem", "I closed it without sleeping." After the third repetition the recruiter sees the character.
• The closing line is the character's manifesto.The last line of the CV can be like a note left on a desk: "I was hired to bring ownership to the company — I have repeatedly done so." The Firefighter's manifesto. The last frame of the Marlboro Man.

Is the character working? Measurement is needed

The Marlboro campaign's first four months saw no movement in market share. I know they were inclined to drop the archetype back at the office. I insisted. By month five the Nielsen numbers came in, sales exploded. A character is remembered late but lodges deep.

The same patience is needed for CVs. The week you write it, interviews may not rain. But within a six-week trail you'll see the difference — if you're tracking. Has the open rate gone from 30% to 55%? Has the recruiter begun to reach page two in the average dwell? Is there a second opening?

Tools like Lurien exist for precisely this: is the character working, and if not, where is it being lost? Our Marlboro campaign was measured on the Nielsen panel. Your CV is measured against every recruiter it reaches. The same discipline, faster feedback.

Last word

Advertising has taught the same lesson for sixty years: people don't take the truth, they take what they remember. What is remembered is a single named character. A CV cannot escape that law either.

For this week I give you an assignment: don't take your CV to bed — leave it on the desk, and only answer one question: "Does this CV tell a character, or is it one of five hundred identical CVs?" If the answer is "one of five hundred," rewrite. As if you've found the Marlboro Man, rewrite. The rest of your life fits into one sentence — let that sentence be the top line of your CV.