The best time to look for a job is when you don't need one

A Senior Director of Infrastructure said to us: "Hey, I have a kid on the way to college and I need to land a job with better pay as soon as possible."

The interesting thing is that we had spoken to this candidate a year earlier and had told him he'd do well in the market given his experience.

And that's the truth about today's executive job market:

The best time to look for your next role is when you don't actually need one.

Why executive roles reward preparation

Because executive hiring doesn't happen overnight, but it can be fast-tracked with the right approach.

At the Director, VP, and C-Suite level, you're competing for a handful of opportunities that open when a business decides to launch a new product, enter a new market, replace a leader, or fix a critical problem.

Those roles appear unpredictably, and the executives who land them are the ones who already have their resume polished, target roles identified, and hiring managers taking their calls; not the ones starting from scratch after the pressure is already on.

Fortunately, we like pressure.

Offboarded within 40 days

When we onboarded him, our client started seeing results within the first 2 weeks, and was interviewing for 5 companies within the first month. He said:

“I wasn’t expecting things to click this early, I was thinking you guys would take something like 3 months to get me a solid offer.”

Well, we offboarded him within 40 days of joining us, with a Senior Director of IT role at a scaling logistics company based out of Chicago. His total comp is now $250K, up from the $190K he was making in his previous role. Pretty sweet if you ask me.

The best part? We did not “fast-track” or rush anything with his job search, the result was a combination of his experience and our methodology of landing interviews for tech leaders on autopilot.

Build your harbor before your ships

A rushed job search forces rushed decisions; a proactive one gives you leverage to negotiate compensation, choose the right opportunity, and walk away from the wrong ones. If you “need” to find a new job you’re already very late. While things worked out in this case, being prepared beforehand would have saved our client multiple months of anxiety.

You build your harbor BEFORE you build your ships.