Insights
The Best Senior Roles Are Never Advertised
April 13, 2026
A client of mine — call him Marc — is a chief commercial officer in healthcare. When we started working together he was between roles, doing some consulting, and applying for things in the usual way. Getting nowhere.
He wanted two things. A board seat, and his next C-level role — but the right one. Not an execution job, polishing a commercial machine someone else had built. A strategic one: involved in raising, shaping the story for investors, sitting close to the board. The kind of role where you are hired for your judgement rather than your hands.
Neither of those ambitions was ever going to appear on a job board.
The posting is the end of the process, not the start
Most people carry a mental model of hiring that goes: a role opens, it gets advertised, candidates apply and the best one wins. That model is broadly true up to a point in the market. Above that point — somewhere around the level where your hire becomes a board conversation — it stops describing reality.
At senior level, roles are resolved long before they are filled. A board knows it has a gap, or is about to have one, months before anything is formalised. Conversations start. Names get floated. A search firm may be briefed, and the first thing the search firm does is work the long list of people it already knows. By the time a role is publicly visible, it is usually either a formality or the first attempt to fill it has failed.
Nobody is hiding anything from you. This is simply how decisions get made when a single hire can reshape a company and the pool of credible candidates is small. Boards hire people they can vouch for, or people someone they trust can vouch for. The advert is what happens when that mechanism runs out of road.
Which means that if your search consists of monitoring postings — however diligently — you are fishing in the part of the river where the failed searches wash up.
What Marc actually did
Marc had what every senior person has and almost nobody uses: twenty years of accumulated relationships. The little black book. His was like most — full of people who rated him, and who had not heard from him in years.
The first move was unglamorous. We turned that book into something fit for the digital age: a live, worked list of who he knew, what they were doing now and where they sat relative to the rooms he wanted to be in. A spreadsheet, plus some honesty about which relationships were warm and which actually mattered.
Then he re-engaged, systematically, across whatever channel suited the relationship — and the single most effective one, to his surprise and slightly to mine, was WhatsApp. Not the wordsmithed LinkedIn message that announces itself as a campaign. A short, human message on the channel people actually answer.
The second move was the one most people will not make. When a company in his space announced an acquisition, the standard play is to congratulate the person responsible. Safe, and instantly forgettable — their notifications are full of it. Marc asked a challenging question instead: how, exactly, were they reconciling the rather woolly science behind the asset they had just bought?
That message got a conversation. The conversation got him asked for his CV — unprompted. Nobody asks an applicant a question like that. A peer asks it. By being slightly more provocative than feels comfortable, he had repositioned himself from someone looking for a role to someone whose view you would want in the room.
From there, the pattern repeated. Conversations led to discussions, which led to other discussions, which led to a board seat. When it landed, his word for it was telling: it felt *inevitable*. Anyone who has spent six months on job boards knows that inevitable is the opposite of how that process feels.
The two hard parts
None of this was effortless, and it is worth being honest about where the difficulty actually sat — because it was not where people expect.
**Getting others to advocate for you.** The hidden market runs on people saying your name in rooms you are not in. You cannot ask for that directly; “please recommend me” puts the other person in your debt, and most people resent it. What works is making advocacy easy and worthwhile — being useful first, and giving people a sentence about you that is specific enough to repeat. Win-win, or it does not happen.
**Controlling the narrative.** Before anyone advocates for you, they need to know what they are advocating *for*. Marc’s answer to “what is your story” existed — but it was buried in a CV built the way people feel CVs should be built: chronological and dutiful. The raw material of his actual value — the judgement calls, the raises he had shaped — was all in there, hidden in plain sight under formatting conventions. Nothing needed inventing. It needed extracting. Once the narrative was clear, everything else got easier, because everyone repeating his name was repeating the same story.
The search firms work exactly the same way
A word about the Egon Zehnders and Heidricks of the world, because senior candidates consistently misread them.
The instinct is to approach a search firm the way you would approach an employer: send a strong CV, follow up politely. I have mapped the executive search landscape in Switzerland in some detail, and I can tell you what that approach yields, even for CEO-level clients: nothing. Not a rejection — nothing. Cold inbound is simply not how these firms work, and no amount of polish changes that.
The reason is structural. Their client is the board paying the fee. Their stock-in-trade is candidates they can vouch for, and they cannot vouch for an email. So the firms run on precisely the same mechanism as the rest of the senior market: referral and advocacy. A partner takes a name seriously when it arrives through someone they trust — a board member, a former placement. You do not get into the database by submitting to it. You get in because someone put you there.
They don’t take calls. They make them. Your job is to become the kind of name that gets passed to them — which, conveniently, is the same job Marc was already doing.
What this means if you are senior and searching
Three things, and none of them is “network more.”
First, change your model of where roles come from. At your level the market is conversations. The postings are a lagging indicator of conversations that happened without you, and your time allocation should reflect that — for most senior searchers it is precisely backwards.
Second, your existing relationships are the asset, and they are almost certainly under-managed. The real work is systematically warming up the people who already rate you, on channels they actually answer, with something more interesting to say than “I’m exploring new opportunities.”
Third, comfort is the tell. The safe message — the congratulations, the polished application — is safe precisely because it is indistinguishable from everyone else’s. The moves that worked for Marc all shared one quality: they were slightly more direct than felt comfortable. That discomfort is the price of being remembered.
The board seat came. The conversations about the right executive role are the kind he wanted to be having. Not one of them started with an advert. If your network is full of people who rate you but haven’t heard from you in years, that’s a system problem — and systems can be built. Let’s talk it over.
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