Running an executive search after fifty

What genuinely gets harder

• Advertised processes, where a large applicant pool is filtered quickly by people optimising for risk. This is where age most affects outcomes, and it is the channel most easily avoided.
• Roles defined as a step up in a sector you have not worked in. The story requires more explaining, and processes reward stories that need no explaining.
• Companies whose leadership is uniformly younger, where the concern is usually unspoken and therefore unanswerable.

What gets easier, and is underused

You know more people, and at this stage of a career those people are senior. The single most effective channel in any executive search — an introduction from someone credible — is precisely the channel that improves with time. An executive at fifty-five typically has several hundred relationships with people who can open a door, most of them dormant.

The channel where age counts against you is the one you compete in anonymously. The channel where experience counts for you is the one where somebody vouches.

What this implies about method

On the things you cannot change

Some companies will decide on grounds they will never state, and no method reaches those. The correct response is not to argue with it but to spend your hours where the decision is made by people who can be persuaded — which is usually a conversation, not a screening.

The honest limit

This does not make the disadvantage disappear. It moves the search into the channel where the disadvantage is smallest and your accumulated advantage is largest, which is the only lever anyone actually has.