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Talent
Inside the hidden job market: What helps senior executives gain traction
Most senior executives know that leadership hiring happens through relationships, not job boards. The harder challenge is navigating the hidden job market without losing focus, credibility, or energy.
Rapid read:
- At senior levels, competence is assumed. What the hidden job market rewards is clarity â strategic positioning, narrative coherence, and profiles that others can confidently advocate for.
- Broad visibility without focus stalls transitions. Specificity, while counterintuitive, creates traction by making it easier for recruiters, peers, and boards to act on a leaderâs behalf.
- Senior transitions are long and demanding. Those who succeed treat the search as a structured project, manage energy deliberately, and invest in sustained relationships well before they need them.
Something has shifted in the professional job market. Searches are taking longer. Applications convert less reliably. Roles that once took weeks to fill now stretch into months, if they are filled externally at all. For senior executives, who have always operated by a different set of rules, even those rules are changing.
The visible market â postings, platforms, applicant tracking systems â has simultaneously become easier to access and harder to convert. AI has made it simple to apply for hundreds of roles. It has also made it simple to screen out hundreds of applicants. What remains is a market that looks busy but yields little.
Most executives navigating a leadership transition understand this terrain. Roles are often filled before they are advertised. Relationships matter more than applications. Search firms serve clients, not candidates. The playbook is well understood.
What is harder to explain is why, despite following it, so many experienced leaders find themselves stalled. Conversations multiply, but traction doesnât always follow. Effort increases; clarity recedes.
What emerges is not a misunderstanding of where senior hiring happens, but a market that has shifted â and a set of mindset changes required to move through it deliberately. Executive careers are becoming less linear â and this requires senior leaders to increasingly take a more deliberate approach to managing them.
Yet understanding how the market works is only the first step. The deeper challenge is understanding what the market actually rewards. Not the job market. The reputation market.
Why the traditional playbook no longer works
The starting point is a reframe that many executives resist, then find liberating: at senior levels, competence is the baseline. The hidden job market operates less on visibility than on reputation. The question it is actually asking is not whether a candidate is capable, but whether they are positioned. Many leaders are competent. Far fewer are clearly positioned.
From the search side, the logic is straightforward. Senior mandates are not about exploring potential, but about reducing risk for the client, said Joan Beets, Managing Partner at executive search firm KennedyFitch. Search firms work for companies, not candidates, and prioritize certainty over optionality.
âThereâs basically three main reasons for us to reach out to candidates,â she explained. âOne is clearly we have a mandate and your profile seems to be a good pick for that. The second is if we are building up talent pools in particular industries or functions where we feel you would be a good fit. And lastly, because we think you have a strong profile and you could make a good future candidate or possibly a future client.â
In that context, how a leader appears matters as much as what they have done. In practice, many longlists begin with digital searches rather than referrals. Profiles that are broad or unclear are easy to pass over â not because experience is lacking, but because the candidate is hard to position. And what is hard to position is hard to advocate for.
âHeadhunters donât place potential. They place clarity,â he said. âYou are not in the job market⌠you are actually in the reputation market,â shared Arturo Pasquel, Managing Partner at GRASS and Partners and Career Strategist for the Executive MBA program at IMD.
Seen this way, the hidden job market is less about searching widely and more about being clearly identifiable as the right solution. That clarity is what allows others â recruiters, peers, and former colleagues â to advocate on a candidateâs behalf.
The six dimensions of competitive identity
One useful way to think about this positioning challenge is through what Pasquel describes as âcompetitive identityâ â six dimensions that together determine whether a senior executive can be clearly positioned in the hidden job market. Most people are strong on one or two. Very few have attended to all six.
Strategic positioning: what does the executive want to be known for, specifically? Not a list of capabilities â a singular answer that others can repeat on their behalf.
Differentiation: why this person, among many equally experienced peers? Most executives find this genuinely uncomfortable, and often avoid it longer than they should. It requires moving beyond the CV into the territory of a genuine value proposition.
Authority: not title, but visible results. A strong track record needs to be accessible, whether that is through LinkedIn, word of mouth, or the quality of references. What matters is that it is findable.
Narrative coherence: does the story of a career make sense as a series of deliberate choices? We see careers as strategic moves, not evolution. The ability to connect the dots compellingly is what separates memorable candidates from those who are not.
Visibility: not just presence, but quality of presence. What do people encounter when they search? Visibility, done well, puts a leader in front of people before they are actively looking.
Identity alignment: does everything a leader says, publishes, and signals point in the same direction? Coherence across conversations and profiles is what makes a candidate easy to remember â and easy to refer.
One of the most counterintuitive pieces of advice is to approach the search like a sniper, not a shotgun.
Sniper, not shotgun
One of the most counterintuitive pieces of advice is to approach the search like a sniper, not a shotgun. The fear is that specificity will close doors. In practice, the opposite is true.
Focus is what allows others to act. A headhunter can make a referral. A peer can open a door. A former colleague can make an introduction with confidence. Without a clear direction, those conversations remain pleasant but inconclusive. The candidate is remembered fondly, but it is unclear how to help them.
âYou need to be a sniper and not a shotgun⌠if I meet you and you say I can do 50 things and Iâm open to 50 things, I wonât remember you,â said Beets.
A transition is not simply about landing the next role, but about recognizing that career ownership is a lifelong journey. Managing an executive career means thinking beyond the immediate search and continuously cultivating the relationships and networks that shape future opportunities.
Senior transitions also take longer than most executives expect. Six to 12 months is not unusual. Treated as an open-ended state of readiness, the search quickly becomes draining. Treated as a structured phase of career management, it becomes survivable.
Beets encourages candidates to approach the process with discipline. âRun your search like a job,â she advised. But even with structure, rejection is part of the process. âYouâre going to get rejected⌠itâs nobodyâs hobby,â she said, emphasizing the importance of maintaining energy and perspective throughout the search.
As part of the advice I share with EMBA participants, the starting point is simple: be focused enough so people can help you. Identify three roles, sectors, or directions that genuinely interest you. Research them deliberately â both online and through conversations â and refine your positioning as you learn more about the market. Manage your career as you would manage a business: with intention, persistence, and a clear focus on the value you bring to your target organizations.
The person responsible for recruitment inside a target organization is worth finding and contacting directly, before a role exists.
Beyond headhunters: the in-house search teams
One shift many executives overlook: the growth of in-house recruitment capabilities. As hiring got easier through LinkedIn and AI, and the cost of recruitment remained high, many companies have built the internal capability to recruit and manage talent pipelines directly. This requires senior executives to network both within their own organizations and across others to move ahead of the visible job market.
The person responsible for recruitment inside a target organization is worth finding and contacting directly, before a role exists. If wanting to connect with someone at a large global search firm, avoid the partners as they tend to be client-focused; a more effective route is often through a consultant or associate. At boutiques or smaller executive search firms, like Kennedy Fitch, approaching a partner directly works better. Across all of them, referrals remain the single most effective way to get noticed.
Network before the need
Networking at the point of need is too late. Executives who approach their network when already in transition are, unconsciously, telling a different story because of it. The relationships, the reputation, the goodwill â these need to be built before the need arises.
A network provides three things: early intelligence on roles; context no website gives â culture, internal dynamics, strategic direction; and advocacy. Not connections but people willing to advocate for you.
Pasquel emphasized that strong networks rarely appear overnight: âThe contact needs to happen before you have the need.â
The most useful reframe is about intent. Effective networking is not about asking for roles â it is about curiosity, reciprocity, and exchange. Two questions worth anchoring with every conversation: âWhat can I do for you?â and âWho else would it be useful for me to speak to?â
For executives between roles: get comfortable walking into a room and telling people you donât have a job. Owning the transition, rather than obscuring it, creates the conditions for honest conversations and the trust that leads to advocacy.
A word on the over-50s question
The challenges facing executives later in their careers are real. Age-related assumptions persist, including in automated screening. Experience can be misread as rigidity. Some of what is happening reflects age-related bias, including in automated screening systems â a reality many executives encounter but rarely name.
And yet a mindset shift is also required. Many executives above 50 arrive confident their track record speaks for itself. In some respects, it does. But re-entering the market still requires the work: self-reflection, deliberate positioning, and outreach. The market will not move toward someone simply because they have been successful.
Face-to-face conversation remains the most effective counter; it is often only when someone meets a candidate in person that assumptions fall away. The portfolio path â advisory roles, board positions, project-based work â is not a consolation prize, but for many a more sustainable and purposeful configuration of contribution.
Most executives already know where hiring happens.
Not one step ahead, but two or three
The most important decision any executive can make is clarifying what they want to offer the market, not just for the next role, but as a sustained proposition. As AI reshapes organizations, technical fluency matters less than judgment, discernment, and the ability to lead through ambiguity. These are the hard skills of the next decade.
Finding a role is a process in which leaders tap into themselves, connect to their energy and purpose, and bring that to the market. The hidden job market has never been a place of certainty. Success depends less on visibility than on being easy to position, credible to recommend, and coherent when it really counts.
Most executives already know where hiring happens. The harder work is learning to move through that terrain deliberately, without losing energy, credibility, or confidence along the way.
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