Oct. 3, 2025
37: If Your Job Search Is Taking Too Long, Stop Trusting Your Gut
If your job search is taking too long and you’re a mid or senior-level leader, your gut may be telling you it’s time to broaden your appeal. To have a more general and therefore more appealing positioning. Don’t do it! Host Doug Lester explains, from a recruiter’s perspective, why broadening your positioning could be a big mistake.
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00:00 - Introduction
01:31 - Broadening Your Positioning in a Tight Market is a Mistake
02:33 - A Recruiter’s Perspective on Positioning
04:20 - Being a Senior Leader Requires Depth and Credibility
05:35 - Examples of Focused Senior Positioning
06:07 - Focus Your Positioning on Overcoming a Common Challenge in Your Industry
06:55 - A Lesson from Consumer Products Marketing
07:27 - Fight Your Gut Instincts in a Tight Market
07:44 - What Challenges Can You Overcome?
08:10 - Newsletter Moving to Substack, Please Subscribe!
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You're not imagining it.
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It's taking longer to find a new job.
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It's in the air and it's been in the headlines.
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People looking for a job, especially at the mid and senior levels, stay on the market for longer stretches.
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And it's showing up in my coaching sessions with MBAs targeting mid and senior level leadership roles.
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The frustration level.
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It's high.
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The reasons for the slowdown aren't surprising.
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Whether it's AI replacing higher-paid knowledge workers or economic uncertainty leading to hiring freezes, switching jobs or finding one when you're out of work can be a longer, more anxiety-filled proposition than it used to be.
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So if you're hoping to land a new role and you're at the end of your rope, or you feel you might be there soon, how do you accelerate your job search?
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How can you stand out and become more attractive to recruiters?
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Stay tuned.
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So you're looking for a new job and your search is taking longer than you'd like, and you want to stand out and be more attractive to recruiters.
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Here's how not to do it.
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Don't broaden your positioning in the marketplace.
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Don't make it less specific or less specialized.
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If your gut tells you to do that, then it's probably leading you in the wrong direction.
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If you're like many of the people I coach who are facing an extended job search, your instinct might be to broaden your appeal.
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You start thinking that your resume and LinkedIn profile position you too narrowly.
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Recruiters and hiring managers are passing you by.
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As a result, you assume they must be looking for candidates with broader or more general profiles.
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That has to be why the recruiters aren't calling, right?
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So you listen to your gut and you make your positioning in the marketplace more general and ultimately more generic.
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But if you do that, you're unintentionally prolonging your job search.
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Here's why.
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I've seen this from an insider's perspective before becoming a full-time executive and career coach.
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I was a recruiter at a top executive search firm, and when we started a new search, I'd hear some version of the same micro-monologue from our lead client.
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I could practically count the minutes, maybe even the seconds before they said it.
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Here's what it was.
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I'm gonna pretend to be the client now.
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Our organization is at a unique point in its history facing a unique set of challenges, and we need a leader who has already overcome those challenges in an organization like ours, preferably several times.
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That's it.
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It was simple and direct and it had a huge influence on how we searched for and evaluated candidates.
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As recruiters, we weren't looking for someone with experience as a general manager who could, and I'll put this in quotes,“Do anything.” We were looking for someone with credible focused leadership experience who had already overcome the specific challenge or challenges our client was facing, and they needed to have done it in a reasonably similar role.
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Not always exactly the same role and in an exactly similar business to our clients.
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It didn't have to be an exact match, but it had to be close.
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That was what made someone stand out when we were researching potential candidates, and that's what earned them a spot in our candidate pool.
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That pool wasn't populated by a bunch of quick learners who could do anything.
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Now, the people we ultimately recruited might actually have been quick learners.
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They probably were.
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They might have been able to do anything.
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They were almost always adaptable, but that's not what they led with and that's not what we were looking for.
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And when you take a minute to think about it, it's not the highly experienced senior leaders who describe themselves as quick learners who are able to do anything.
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That's the junior people looking for a break or a leg up when they're in the early stages of their career.
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This kind of I-can-do-anything positioning works at that stage.
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You aren't expected to have deep experience in any particular area, so being a quick learner gives you an edge.
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And being adaptable is essential as you test out new roles and situations or you're called upon to bend and flex by your boss or company.
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But now, as a senior leader or an aspiring senior leader, you need depth and credibility.
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You need meaningful experience in a particular type of role in a particular industry overcoming a particular set of challenges.
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That's your depth and credibility.
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You need to be more focused to be competitive in a tough market.
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And that's what recruiters are looking for.
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Someone with credibility and depth in the type of role they're trying to fill.
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Someone who has already overcome the challenge or the challenges their client is currently facing, and someone who knows they can do it again with confidence and clarity of purpose.
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So what might a more focused positioning look like?
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Here are some examples.
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A startup operations leader who can establish the structure, systems and processes that position a high potential new business for growth.
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Here's another.
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A visionary, CEO, who can transform a legacy consumer brand that's struggling to stay up-to-date and relevant.
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And another.
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A data-driven CMO who can leverage customer analytics to revitalize a stagnant SaaS product in an increasingly crowded marketplace.
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Now, you may have noticed that while these positioning statements are fairly specific, none of them is especially limiting.
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In fact, each one points to a fairly common business problem that many companies face.
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And by putting the emphasis on a relatively common challenge, you can earn trust with executive recruiters and the other gatekeepers to your career advancement without pigeonholing yourself.
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If you think back to the examples I suggested, none of them are especially pigeonhole-y.
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Every new business needs structure, systems and processes to grow without spiraling out of control.
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Most legacy brands, at some point, find themselves struggling to stay relevant.
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And is there a SaaS product in existence that couldn't benefit from a little customer analytics to be more competitive?
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It is just like when I was working in consumer products marketing, a prior line of work that I often draw on in my coaching practice.
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A product needs to communicate a positioning that gets a target thinking that this product is“for someone like me.” To do that, you need a little specificity.
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In this case, the product is you and the target is the hiring managers and executive recruiters.
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And they need to be able to identify fairly quickly that your positioning is the right match for their or their clients' current challenges.
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So fight your gut instincts, at least when it comes to your positioning in a tight job market.
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It's a bit like investing in an economic downturn.
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When your emotions and your gut tell you to sell, it might just be the time to double down and buy more of what you already have.
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Thinking about your own positioning in the market, what challenges have you already overcome in a leadership setting?
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And would you want to overcome them again?
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If the answer to that last question is yes, then double down on those challenges as you draft your positioning and craft your personal narrative.
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Because if you do, you've just found your competitive advantage and your
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personal accelerator in a tight job market.
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Now before I sign off, I wanted to let you know that I'm in the process of moving my newsletter from careernarratives.com, my website, over to Substack.
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You can find the newsletter now at craftyournarrative.careers.
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That's craftyournarrative.careers.
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Please visit and subscribe.
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I'll be using Substack as a place to experiment and maybe try a few new things.
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So visit craftyournarrative.careers.
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Or if you're already on Substack, just search for me, Doug Lester.
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I'd love to see you there.
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personal accelerator in a tight job market.
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