Who Are Your Advocates in Your Executive Job Search?
Who Are Your Advocates in Your Executive Job Search?
When you’re looking down the double barrels of a complex job search, you might be feeling isolated. In most cases, you can’t talk to your immediate colleagues, your suppliers, or your customers. What do you do when you want to move on from your current role, but you have no idea to whom you will turn for help? Who are your advocates in your executive job search?
Your Existing Network
Certainly, speaking to your current employees or executive team about your plans to make a career move is tricky–or professionally suicidal. However, you likely have a “professional board of directors” who can serve as your sounding board. If you’re planning to change companies or careers, these individuals can advise you on the status of their companies, industries, and more.
Where to look: Start with your close contacts, such as relatives or close former colleagues–these will be your safest audience.
Recruiters
Recruiters can be your best confidential advocates–if they have identified you as a unique resource to pitch to their clients. Of necessity, recruiters follow the needs of their clients, which are the companies that hire them to find unique talent. So while your job search should never start with the premise that you will “work with recruiters.” They know how to find you if they need you, and spreading yourself thinly across a pool of recruiters dilutes your uniqueness. If a recruiter finds you and asks you about your interest in a particular position, that’s a call for which you should always make time.
Where to look: Don’t look at all. Let them find you.
Executive Career Coach and Executive Resume Writer
Your executive career coach and resume writer can be your best advocate throughout your career transition. This professional is always on your side, helping you to develop clarity for your:
- Target executive title
- Target industry
- Target company
- Messaging and story telling
- Marketing portfolio, e.g., your executive resume and cover letter
- Social media presence, including but not limited to LinkedIn profile development
Where to look: Call me to identify whether we are a good fit.
Image courtesy of freeimages.com / sscharlo
