Heather Maitre

For senior executives, job-search feedback is often brief, polite, and frustratingly vague. “We decided to move in a different direction.” “You have an impressive background, but you may be overqualified.” “We’re looking for someone who is a closer fit.” Sometimes, those statements are accurate. A company may truly need a different functional specialty, or a leader at another scale, or someone prepared to work within a specific compensation range. But vague feedback can also obscure a more...

Aimless, unstrategic networking adds an average of 11 weeks to an executive job search. At the VP level and above, where executive searches average 12-18 months, that is non-trivial: it represents a $60k - $113k+ opportunity cost.

AI has raised the floor on resume quality, but when everyone uses the same two or three generative AI tools, every resume sounds confident, strategic, and impact-focused, and almost none of them stand out or feel like a person wrote them.