There is no shortage of support for an executive between roles. There is a shortage of the two specific things that determine how long the gap lasts.
Encouragement, structure and material. A coach to talk to, a rewritten profile, a workshop on interviewing, a peer group of people in the same position. All of it is genuinely useful and none of it is scarce — which is worth noticing, because scarce things are what move outcomes.
Not which are advertising — which have changed in a way that creates a seat. This is knowable earlier than most people assume, and it is the difference between arriving during a shortlist and arriving before one exists.
Warm introductions are the mechanism senior hiring runs on. What is missing is rarely the relationship; it is a specific, current reason to use it.
Both scarce things require work that does not feel like progress. Watching twenty companies for three months produces nothing visible until it produces everything; sending four careful messages a week feels slower than sending forty applications, right up to the point where the four produce a conversation and the forty produce silence.
Support is abundant and timing is scarce. A transition is usually lost to the second, while the first is what gets bought.
None of this makes a senior search short. What it does is stop it being random — replacing a queue you cannot influence with a set of companies you have chosen, watched, and become known at.
Outplacement is a service your former employer buys for you. Knowing what it is paid to do — and what it is not — is what stops you relying on it for the part it cannot reach.
Read → The reverse job searchThere is a window between a seat becoming real and a shortlist existing. Arriving inside it is worth more than any improvement to your CV.
Read → The reverse job searchFifteen years of colleagues is the most valuable and least used asset in a senior search. How to see it clearly, and how to ask without spending it badly.
Read →A short call, your target list, and an honest answer about whether this fits how you are running your search.