By SGN | 29 Sep 2026
Cindi Wirawan spent five years headhunting senior talent across Asia Pacific before moving into coaching. She now coaches leaders on career, leadership and personal branding, and is the founder of Vibe Tribe, where she helps professionals and leaders build the visibility and reputation that gets them chosen.
She shares what separates leaders who get discovered from those who stay invisible, no matter how strong their track record.
What do employers actually look for when hiring for senior positions?
I spent around five years in talent acquisition before I became a coach, and here’s what’s changed: at senior levels, employers increasingly look beyond the CV very quickly because the market has forced them to.
ManpowerGroup’s 2026 Talent Shortage Survey covered 39,000 employers across 41 countries, 72% struggle to fill roles, and for the first time, AI skills have overtaken every other category as the hardest to source. Robert Half’s latest data also shows 71% of tech leaders had projects delayed by skills shortages in the past year.
This pressure changes what they screen for.Three things stand out.
- AI fluency paired with judgement. Fluency alone is table stakes now; what’s rare is a leader who can pair AI capabilities with commercial or governance sense.
- Communication is key. LinkedIn’s 2026 Skills on the Rise puts executive communication in the top cluster of human skills globally, and hiring-manager surveys keep ranking it the number one soft skill.
- A strong reference trail. The interview can begin before you meet the hiring manager – back-channel references through mutual connections can carry enormous weight. In a market as connected as Singapore, there is often a mutual connection.
What do most candidates overlook when it comes to their own career positioning?
The gap between what they’ve done and what they’re known for.
Most candidates can spend twenty minutes talking about their achievements. But very few can answer this question well: when a specific type of problem comes up, are you the first name mentioned in the room? That’s what positioning actually is at this level, being the obvious answer to a particular question.
The other thing candidates overlook is their own sweet spot: the combination of skills, experience and passion that no one else has. This combination is their edge over other leaders.
Achievements tell hiring managers where you’ve been; your sweet spot tells them why you’re the one to bring in next.
What's the biggest mistake candidates make that reveal that they're not ready for more?
Running the old playbook.
A senior candidate walks in with an impressive track record and pitches a repeat performance: here’s what I did at my last company, and I’ll do it again for you. It sounds confident.
To a hiring leader, it signals the opposite.
Boards and CEOs have become sharper about this. The question has shifted from “Were you great?” to “Would you be great here, in our culture, our market, our ownership structure.
Senior hires can struggle when someone imports their old answers into a new context instead of first diagnosing what this organisation actually needs.
A candidate is ready when they have diagnosed the context first and can say: here’s what I’d preserve from my past experience, here’s what I’d change, and here’s what I’ll test before deciding. That tells a hiring leader that you lead from judgement, not habit. You may seem qualified on paper, but they’d be hiring your past, and your past may have worked for reasons that don’t exist in their company.
How can candidates craft their career narrative successfully?
Personal branding early in your career is about differentiation, standing out from a large pool of people with similar qualifications. A leadership narrative is a through-line. It answers one question coherently: why do your moves make sense, and what are you building toward? Boards and hiring leaders are looking for a thesis, which is an arc of decisions that shows deliberate judgement over time, including the moves that appeared sideways at the time.
I use a simple frame with clients, called the Career Sweet Spot: the intersection of your talent, your passion, and what the market actually needs. At leadership level, every chapter of your story should show those three converging more sharply. When they do, your story stops sounding like a list of jobs, and starts sounding like a direction.
Beyond the framing, it comes down to optics and reputation management. At this level, your personal brand is being formed whether you participate or not, so manage it deliberately, the way you’d manage any other asset.
In practice, audit your optics regularly, read your own LinkedIn profile the way a board member would, keep the narrative consistent everywhere, show your thinking publicly and consistently, and protect the reputation side, how you exit companies, how you treat people on the way through, what former teams say when you’re out of the room.
In a market like Singapore, that back-channel can become a powerful part of your brand.
How should candidates talk about their track record without sounding like a highlight reel?
It comes down to learning how to tell a strategic business story.
This involves walking people through the challenges you faced, what you actually did, what you learned along the way, and the impact you made. That structure does the credibility work for you. A highlight reel lists outcomes.
The skill is telling it concisely and engagingly. Concise, because at senior level clarity signals strong thinking and rambling signals the opposite. Engaging, because people remember stories and forget lists.
What you learned is the part that separates it from a highlight reel, a leader who can talk openly about a challenge that stretched them, or a call they’d make differently now, comes across as secure and self-aware.
What carries over when you move your career to Singapore, and what needs to be rebuilt?
More than you might expect, because Singapore is very interconnected.
If you join an office here for a well-known company, chances are someone will ask a colleague in another office (maybe in the country you came from) and they’ll know somebody who worked with you. Everyone’s connected on LinkedIn anyway, so your track record and name will travel, through mutual connections and whatever trail you’ve built online.
What doesn’t carry over is cross-cultural communication. Operating in Singapore, and across the region, often means learning a different way of reading a room, giving feedback, and building consensus. This has to be learned here, and it can catch even very experienced leaders off guard.
The relationships don’t carry over either. The trust you built in your home market took years, and you’ll need to build it again from scratch here. Your reputation might open the first door, but trust here is earned in person, over time, through consistency.
What's the first step for a senior candidate who feels invisible despite a strong CV and experience?
Start by being seen.
The first step is to ensure visibility in-person – be deliberate about being present in the rooms where decisions, relationships and industry conversations happen. Presence still counts for more than we like to admit, attending events by Singapore Global Network is one good way to show up.
Meet people in your market face to face, say yes to panel discussions, go after speaking opportunities. And show up on LinkedIn, consistently, so the people who meet you in person can find you and follow your thinking afterward.
A strong track record can’t work for you if nobody encounters it. Candidates who feel invisible usually aren’t lacking substance. They’ve simply been brilliant in private, assuming the work would speak for itself. It won’t. Your work speaks for itself only after someone hears about it.
So show up, in the room and online, before you need anything. Visibility compounds. The leaders who do this get seen, then trusted, then chosen. The ones who wait keep wondering why the phone stays silent.
At what point does visibility stop being a good-to-have, and becomes a career gamechanger?
Early and mid-career professionals can still get by on being findable and applying well. Senior leaders get chosen based on what’s known about them, what’s being said about them by people in the industry, and who’s in their network.
At the senior level, visibility stops being optional. Staying in contention isn’t just about technical capability anymore, it’s about optics and personal branding. Relying only on applications and sending out your resume becomes far less effective at that level.
What works is having the right network, being known in your industry and on LinkedIn, and paying attention to how you’re perceived. Your reputation does the heavy lifting.
TLDR: A playbook for how candidates can build visibility successfully
Audit Your Optics
Search yourself the way a board member would. Make sure your LinkedIn profile, and what people say about you offline, tell the same story as the role you want next.
Find Your Career Sweet Spot
Protect Your Reference Trail
Your back-channel reputation, the way you exit roles, how you treat people and what former teams say about you, can shape how you are assessed before you walk into the room.
Show Up Before You Need To
Go to events, get in the room, and post consistently online. Visibility compounds only if you start before you need it.
Key Takeaways: Getting discovered as a senior leader
- At senior level, reputation and network play a much bigger role alongside formal applications. Hiring leaders are often influenced by what’s already known about you before they review what you send them.
- Positioning means being the obvious name for a specific type of problem, built on the intersection of your talent, passion, and what the market needs, not just a list of past achievements.
- The market has sharpened its screening: 72% of employers report difficulty filling roles and AI skills are now the hardest to source, while back-channel reference checks can also carry significant weight in senior hiring decisions.
- The most common credibility killer is walking in with an old playbook instead of showing how you’ve diagnosed the new context.
- Singapore is highly interconnected. Your reputation may travel with you and open the first door, but relationships and trust still need to be built locally over time.
About Cindi
Cindi Wirawan is the Founder of Vibe Tribe and a LinkedIn Top Voice for Job Search & Careers. She started her career headhunting senior talent across Asia Pacific before moving into coaching, and has since trained thousands of professionals across Singapore, Australia, the US and the UK.
Connect with her here.
