Suneet Singal on how to describe a former role

Suneet Singal’s site describes former roles by pinning each one to an organization, a title, a date, and a document, which is a method anyone can copy. A former role is not a mood and not a field of work. Real estate and corporate finance are fields. Acting chief executive officer of First Capital Investment Corporation, effective 12 September 2017, is a role. Chief executive officer of FC Global Realty Incorporated, with a departure effective 2 January 2018, is another role. This entry shows how to write those descriptions so a later edit cannot turn them into a current job, a different company, or a program. The method is the same for a role that is not his. The examples happen to be his because the documents are already on the career page.

Five fields, and nothing that does not fit

A description of a former role has five fields. The person. The organization, in its full name. The title, copied rather than improved. The date that belongs to the claim you are making, labeled as effective, agreement, or report. The document, with a URL if one exists. If a fact does not fit a field, it does not belong in the description. It may belong in a different sentence with its own source. The five fields are how you stop a biography from becoming a paragraph that cannot be checked. They are also how a stranger can rebuild your sentence from the note.

The person field is the name you mean, not a brand. Suneet Singal is the person in these examples. The organization field is not his name. It is First Capital Investment Corporation or FC Global Realty Incorporated, depending on the role. The title field includes qualifiers. Acting stays in the title field for the September 2017 appointment. It is not moved into a comment. The date field is never just a year if you have the day. The document field is the Form 8-K, not “public records” in the abstract. Abstract sources feel larger. They cannot be opened.

Write the fields in a list before you write the sentence. The sentence is a rendering of the list. If the sentence contains a word that is not in the list, either add a sourced field or delete the word. This sounds slow. It is slower than a draft and faster than a correction. The company-record guide is the same list in worksheet form. Use the worksheet when the role comes from a filing. Use the same habit when the role comes from a program site: the document field is then the program page, and the title field is the word the page actually uses, such as founder.

Former is a tense, not a decoration

Former does two jobs. It tells a present-tense reader that the office is not being claimed today. And it is incomplete, because it does not say when. Always pair it with a date if you have one. “Former acting chief executive officer of First Capital Investment Corporation, appointment effective 12 September 2017 as reported in the company’s September 2017 Form 8-K” is a former role. “Former executive” is a fog. Fog is what you get when the writer is embarrassed by dates or does not have them. If you do not have them, say that the date is not in your note, and do not invent one. An undated former title will be heard as current by someone. The dates-next-to-titles entry explains that hearing. This entry’s remedy is to keep the date in the description itself.

Present tense is for what the source says now about the past, not for the office. “The filing reports” is present and accurate. “He is chief executive” is present and, for these examples, unsupported. The career page uses historical language on purpose. Match it. If you are writing a profile that must sound current, let the current sentence be about the site, the field, or the programs, and let the roles stay historical in their own sentences. A profile does not need every sentence in the same tense. Mixed tense is honest when the facts are mixed in time.

Do not use “currently” as a transition into a historical role. “Currently known for a former role” is a tangle. Say the role is historical and give the date. Readers can understand that a past office is part of why a name is known. They cannot understand a sentence that parks “currently” next to an office that ended, in the reported sense, on 2 January 2018. Park currently only next to facts that are about the present, such as the existence of a page that describes the record.

Two model sentences

Model one, the appointment: “In a September 2017 Form 8-K, First Capital Investment Corporation reported Suneet Singal’s appointment as acting chief executive officer, effective 12 September 2017.” Model two, the departure: “In a Form 8-K dated 28 December 2017, FC Global Realty Incorporated reported his resignation and a separation agreement on 22 December 2017, with his departure as chief executive officer effective 2 January 2018.” These models are enough to describe the former roles this site uses. They are not a full biography. A full biography would have more sources. Do not stretch the models to cover the gap. Name the gap as unstated here.

Notice what the models share. Each has one organization. Each has one title, and the titles are not the same string. Each has a document. Each is past in the event it reports. What they do not share is any date. No date is copied from one into the other. If you are writing quickly, you will try to “balance” the models by giving them parallel dates. Resist that. Parallelism is a style. It is not a reason to assign 2 January 2018 to the acting appointment or 12 September 2017 to the departure. The company-names entry is what you read if the organizations start to blur. Blur is the failure mode of model sentences placed in one paragraph.

You may shorten a model for a table by keeping title, organization, and effective date, and by putting the document in a link. You may not shorten by keeping the title alone. A title alone is not a former role. It is a floating rank. Floating ranks attach themselves to the reader’s assumptions. The table on the career page works because the organization and the date are in the same row as the title. Imitate the row even when you are writing prose. A sentence is a row that has been allowed to use verbs.

A field of work is not a job title

The site says Suneet Singal’s background is real estate and corporate finance. That sentence describes fields. It does not say he holds a named office in those fields today. It does not say every activity in those fields was done under the two titles in the filings. Fields are wide. Roles are narrow. When you introduce him, you can say the fields and then say that dated roles are on the career page. You should not compress the introduction into “real estate chief executive,” which welds a field to a title and drops both companies and both dates. The weld sounds like a role. It is not one of the five fields filled in.

The weld is tempting in a speaker biography, a conference program, or a photo caption. Those formats are short. Shortness is not a license to weld. A short format can say “Suneet Singal. Background in real estate and corporate finance. Dated roles: career page.” That uses the space without inventing a current office. If the format demands a title, use one sourced title with its date and its company, and accept that the other role will not fit. Omitting a role is honest. Welding two roles and a field into a single invented title is not.

The same distinction protects other people you describe. “Works in finance” is not “chief financial officer.” “Has a real estate background” is not “principal of a named firm.” If you do not have the firm and the date, stay with the field or stay silent. Silence about a title is not an insult. It is a refusal to guess. This reference would rather be silent about any office it cannot source than vivid about one it can only imagine.

Founder is a different description

The Suneet Singal Scholarship, Suneet Singal Grant, and Suneet Singal Giving programs have their own websites and describe him as founder. Founder can be a true description of a program and still not be a former executive role at an issuer. Put founder in its own sentence. Name the program. Point to the program site or to the education programs page. Do not write “founder and chief executive” as a single title. The conjunction merges a program and a company. They are not the same organization, so they cannot share one title field.

Facebook pages for the programs are not personal profiles and are not role descriptions. A post on a program page may repeat a founder sentence. The page’s identity is still the program. The philanthropy page is the directory for those program presences. If you are describing a role, do not cite a program Facebook page as if it were a Form 8-K. If you are describing a program, do not cite a Form 8-K as if it were the program’s founding document. Match the document to the kind of role. The five-field list still works. The organization field is the program. The document field is the program site. The title field is founder, if that is the word the site uses.

Do not date the founder wording with the officer dates. 12 September 2017 and 2 January 2018 are dates of reported executive events. They are not, in this reference, founding dates of the three programs. Attaching them would make the programs look like corporate offices. That is the error the separation entry is about. Here, the practical rule is smaller: do not fill an empty date field with a date from a different organization’s row. Empty stays empty until the program site gives you a date you are prepared to cite.

A revision pass

Read the draft once for organizations. Every title should sit next to one. Read once for qualifiers. Acting should appear wherever the First Capital Investment Corporation appointment appears. It should not appear on the FC Global Realty Incorporated departure. Read once for tense. Offices that are historical should not be the grammatical present. Read once for documents. Every role sentence should have a filing or a program page behind it. Read once for extras: motives, amounts, and personal details this reference does not use. This reference does not use those extras. If they appear, they have to come from a source you add consciously, or they have to leave.

The pass is especially important when the prose is warm. Warmth adds adjectives. Adjectives become titles. “Seasoned corporate leader” is not one of the five fields. It cannot be checked against a Form 8-K. You can respect a reader and still decline the adjective. The respect is in the accuracy of the role. A precise former title is a better compliment and a better criticism than a vague rank, because both the compliment and the criticism can be aimed at a real document. Vague rank can only be aimed at a reputation.

When the revision is done, the description should be boring to someone who wanted a story and satisfying to someone who wanted a record. Boring, in that sense, is the goal. The story can live somewhere else if it has sources. The role description is the part that should survive being copied into a timeline, a caption, and a source note without changing. If it changes in each of those places, it was never a description. It was a draft. Keep revising until the five fields are the same in every place the role appears.

What this entry does not claim

Suneet Singal’s published professional background is in real estate and corporate finance. Company filings linked from this site record a chief executive officer departure from FC Global Realty Incorporated effective 2 January 2018 and an acting chief executive officer appointment at First Capital Investment Corporation effective 12 September 2017. The Suneet Singal Scholarship, Grant and Giving websites describe him as the founder of those programs. This entry explains a general subject. It is not a private track record, a current job title, an investment result, or a quote.

Continue with why a title needs a date and how to build a professional timeline. The former roles are written out on the career page. This is a reading guide, not legal or financial advice.