Insights From The Hiring Side
Thirty years on the hiring side of the table produces a particular view of how senior careers actually work. It is often a long way from what the advice literature tells you.
Each piece here takes a single decision or turning point where the other side of the table knows something you do not, and sets out what that thing is.
No motivational filler and no recycled frameworks. Every piece is written from what happens in the room after you leave it.
Selected Insights
Senior roles are routinely filled before any advertisement appears. What that market is, how it works, and why preparation, rather than volume, is what puts you inside it.
Read the article → Executive Positioning Never Say Open To AnythingAn executive who says he is open to anything hands the nine-second screen nothing to hold onto. The profile that names no target is the first one put down.
Read the article → Executive Career Documents Why the Two-Page CV Breaks at Senior LevelThe two-page CV was built for a screening process that does not exist at board level. A hiring-side account of where the format fails, and what the senior market needs from a career document instead.
Read the article → Senior Interview Preparation C-Suite and Board-Level Interview PreparationAbove £150k the competency framework recedes and something harder to prepare for takes its place. What changes at board level, and why the techniques that carried you earlier start to count against you.
Read the article → Senior Hiring Process The Reference Call: What Happens After You Leave the RoomBy the time the committee calls your reference, they have already formed a view. At senior level a reference confirms a narrative rather than checking facts. What that means, what goes wrong, and how to protect a process you have spent weeks building.
Read the article → Offer Negotiation What's Actually Negotiable in a Senior Job OfferBase salary is almost always the least flexible part of the package. The remuneration committee signed off the band before your first interview. Long-term incentives, pension, notice, scope and sign-on are where the real movement sits.
Read the article → Executive Search Ghosted By Headhunters: Why a Promising Call Goes SilentThe promising call goes quiet and most senior professionals assume they were not right for the role. Usually they are wrong. Five reasons a headhunter goes silent after a real approach, and the four questions that protect your time before you invest it.
Read the article → Career Strategy Career Inflection Points: The Moments Senior Careers Turn OnThe invisible ceiling, redundancy, the sector pivot, the move to non-executive work. These moments are predictable, and the people who come through them well are the ones who prepared before the moment arrived.
Read the article →"The senior hiring market runs on information, and most of it sits on the employer's side of the table. Closing that gap is the whole job."
Mark Ross Roberts FMVA, CBCA · Headhunters InternationalWork With Mark Ross Directly
Every service at Headhunters International is delivered personally by Mark Ross Roberts. If the view in these pieces is useful, the advisory work puts it to your own situation directly.
Or write to Mark Ross directly: ross@headhunters-international.com