A client asked me yesterday how he’s supposed to stay confident after the fifth “we went in another direction.” I don’t think he liked my answer. But here’s what I told him.  And I told him. You’re not supposed to. Staying confident through five straight rejections in a senior job search isn’t resilience. That’s denial. What…

A senior director called me last month. She’d been looking for six months. 52 applications. 4 interviews. 0 offers. The first thing she said on our call was, “I think I’m just too senior for the market right now.” I hear some version of that sentence almost every week. Here’s what was actually happening: she…

In 20+ years of hiring senior talent, the one thing I rarely tell candidates out loud: Your resume isn’t supposed to get you hired. It’s supposed to buy you 15 minutes in a room. That’s it. That’s the whole job of the document. The problem is that most senior candidates treat the resume like a…

People sometimes ask me what a coaching session really looks like. It’s a fair question. “Coaching” is one of those words that can mean almost anything depending on who you’re talking to. Here’s what it looks like in my practice. It usually starts with what the person says they need. Resume help. Interview prep. LinkedIn…

There is a communication pattern I see repeatedly in senior leaders and it costs them more than they realize. It shows up in interviews. In boardrooms. In high-stakes presentations. And most of the time, the person doing it has no idea. It’s over-qualification. “This might not be the right answer, but…” “I could be wrong…

You’re not stuck in your search. You’re busy avoiding it. There’s a version of job search activity that feels productive but creates zero forward movement. I see it constantly — especially in senior leaders who are disciplined, high-achieving people in every other area of their lives. It looks like this: Avoiding in a senior search…

Late 2025, I walked away from a full-time corporate career I’d spent 30 years building. That’s not a humble brag. It was genuinely disorienting. I had built something substantial. A reputation, a network, a track record inside organizations that I was proud of. And I chose to leave it. Not because it stopped working, but…

Executive presence isn’t charisma. It’s not a firm handshake, a powerful wardrobe, or the ability to command a room. Those things can exist alongside executive presence. But they are not it.In 20+ years of talent acquisition, hiring at every level, from manager to C-suite, here’s what I’ve consistently seen distinguish leaders who have it: They…

Nobody talks about the specific exhaustion of being great at your job and still having to prove it. That’s the part of a senior job search that doesn’t get enough airtime. You’ve led teams. You’ve driven results. You’ve navigated the hard stuff — budget cuts, reorgs, underperformers, ambiguous mandates. You’ve done it with your name…