Why career counsel matters.
Leveraging long experience of senior recruitment across multiple functions, markets and sectors Larkhall Career Counsel supports those at a career watershed to define, articulate and realise their career objectives.
Why take career counsel at all?
As a senior executive, you give and receive advice on a daily basis. You form decisions based on information and wise counsel. So, when you have a senior vacancy on your board or in your team you naturally turn to the search community for support. To whom, though, do you turn when you are the candidate and not the client?
Frequently the answer is “no one”. It is common practice to consult a range of known headhunters, put the word out, update an existing CV, and wait optimistically for the phone to ring. And if that works, great. But are you maximising your chances of success in a complex market? Does your CV do justice to the executive you are or the one you aspire to be? Having exercised control over most aspects of your life, why cede control in this most important area – the management of your career?
How difficult can it be?
Making the decision that you need to do something different can be the easiest part of making a fundamental career shift.
If you have developed your career in one primary organisation, you have seldom had to reinvent yourself or capture your complex mix of skills and experiences for an external audience. Even if that one primary organisation has offered you a career of extraordinary variety, you might still see the world through the company’s eyes, use the company’s vernacular and valorise in yourself the very things that have most benefitted that company. Your view of yourself and your options might be skewed to the world you know. You are likely to be unfamiliar with how to navigate the labyrinthine world of senior career movement and totally out of practice with regard to interview. You will probably have interviewed countless people yourself, but seldom had the tables turned. It is possible you do not know what you do not know.
Even if you have been reasonably mobile in your career, the scene shifts substantially as you gain seniority. The steps you might have taken to secure a new role in the past may no longer be entirely fit for purpose. The pyramid, after all, narrows as it nears the top. You will also have a fairly restricted lens on the market and the search firms who will recognise your merit and be your advocate.
Larkhall Career Counsel
Larkhall Career Counsel will explore with you what you want to do, why you want to do it and how to go about it, bringing to bear extensive knowledge of senior recruitment across multiple sectors, functions and markets. It can be difficult to think in a vacuum and career change is seldom something that you can throw open for discussion. Larkhall Career Counsel operates as both sounding board and constructive critic.
This is a point of inflection, enabling you to assess the full panoply of your skills and experiences, and to set them in a broader context than you have done to date. It is an opportunity to reflect on the totality of your career, what you have learnt, where you have excelled and where you might go on to excel further. And we won’t take your word for it, but talk to those people who really know what you are like – former bosses, peers, subordinates and personal friends or spouses. Together we will understand and articulate the unique proposition you represent and ensure that there is a clear logic to what you want to do and why you want to do it.
In your daily working life, you probably never drop the ball – if something needs to be done you see to it that it is done, and you are held accountable for so doing. In the matter of your own career development, who is there to hold you to account? In busy lives, it can be all too easy to put off some of those actions that impact only yourself and not your company or your team. Larkhall Career Counsel can step into the breach offering a fixed point of contact to whom you are answerable. We also understand that finding the right new role involves high levels of emotional investment in processes which might end in rejection. We can help you monitor your strategy, maintain your motivation and hold your nerve.
Seeking a senior appointment or making a career change can be a mix of the daunting, the time-consuming, and the downright tiresome – but it needn’t be like that. Instead, it can be an opportunity to reassess your achievements, to see yourself as others see you and to match your aspirations to the market. Larkhall Career Counsel will work with you to measure what you have accomplished to date and what you can go on to accomplish in future, enabling you to take control of your career trajectory based on insight and information. The investment case is, surely, compelling.