Discover 1000's of unlisted executive jobs
Career advice for a CEO (Chief Executive Officer). Maximize compensation, proactively stay marketable, and deliver value to your firm.
Lead5 tracks the appointments and departures of C-level executives at over 40,000 public companies using public data sources and intel from the Lead5 network. The Lead5 brand is built around the five main filters by which an executive views his or her career: Industry, Function, Region, Ownership, and Market Cap.
This is the second in a series of videos designed to empower Lead5 members to discover intel and opportunities relevant to their career journey. Saving Search Queries in Lead5
Candidates departing an executive position often ask us how to handle updating their Linkedin bio. Recruiters advise them against adding an end date to their most recent job until they have secured a new job. This advice is rooted in the adage, “It is always easier to get a job if you have a job.”
It is common for executives to accept a package out of a company in a restructuring. Similarly, if a company is sold, the senior management team of the acquired company is often replaced. There are also instances in which an executive is fired or confidentially let go. It is normal for executives to have between 3 to 6 months between positions. The average executive search at the major search firms lasts over 120 days, closer to 150 days. The elapsed time from the moment a candidate is initially contacted by a recruiter to the moment they officially accept an offer will be, on average, greater than 90 days.
Considering this, savvy recruiters and companies view the executive as a “free agent”. That free agent status can benefit your standing as a finalist in the executive search process for multiple reasons. First, you can start the job more quickly than someone who must resign and give notice. Second, you do not have unvested equity or bonus monies to be made whole on.
When you possess the resume, experience, and stature of a C-level candidate, you do not need to “slow play” updating your Linkedin bio. At Lead5, we recommend you close out your tenure on any public facing bio within 30 days of departure from a company.
If the departure is contentious, have a succinct explanation and provide references. If the CEO will not be a reference, have a board member or key executive at the company who can validate the circumstances. Departures happen to every executive, some for good reasons, some bad, and everything in between. As recruiters, we have seen it all and we are more concerned with what you learned from the experience and how you will grow and excel in your next role.
Embrace your time as a free agent. Three to twelve months between deals is standard for executives in free agent mode. If you have been out of a full-time job longer than 12 months, try to secure a meaningful and substantive consulting role that keeps you in the market and on the pulse of your industry sector.
Also, be open to relocation for greater career opportunities. Post Covid, companies have become more flexible on hybrid or remote work. Even so, for executive positions, a willingness to be based at HQ with the senior leadership team can help distinguish you from other candidates.
If you have personal experiences and lessons learned from your time as an executive “free agent” we would love to hear from you. Join Lead5 today and take advantage of the free 7-day trial plus a complementary career consultation with one of our founders. www.lead5.com
Lead5 tracks executive openings and executive appointments for leading US based companies. Analysis for Lead5 for the second half of 2021 data shows executive appointments slightly up 3% year over year. For Q1 of 2022 executive appointments were down 20% along with executive opportunities also down YoY. Interestingly, the January 2022 executive appointments were up slightly YoY with February starting to trend down and March 2022 executive appointments down 40%. This corresponds with the timing of headline and market data from the war in Ukraine and inflation numbers. We will continue to monitor the Lead5 data set and the effect on executive hiring into Q2 and the summer months.
Now is a great time to research and prepare a pro-active strategy for your next executive career move. Join Lead5 today to stay connected to ever-changing market intel from the Lead5 community. Familiarize yourself with the Indicators of Management Changes, Negotiating Executive Compensation, How to Best Approach Executive Recruiters, How to Best Approach In-House Corporate Recruiters, and Sample Email Templates to Send Direct to Hiring Managers.
We created Lead5 to empower executives with traditionally hidden opportunities and career advancing intel. Today we’re excited to announce the next generation of Lead5, with a new and improved user experience and more complete functionality than ever before to help executives manage the lifecycle of their executive journey.
The next generation Lead5 platform provides:
You can access all these features and more by logging into Lead5 for the new and improved user experience. If you have any questions or feedback we’d love to hear from you, email us at info@lead5.com or take advantage of Lead5’s complementary career consultations where we can demo the next generation of Lead5!
In my 20 plus years of executive search experience, I have worked on hundreds of C-level assignments and navigated countless compensation negotiations through the “offer stage”. Here are 5 tips for executive candidates to keep in mind when closing the deal:
Interested in more career advice? Sign-up for Lead5 and take advantage of the free career consultation plus gain more insight, intel and career tips from the Lead5 Community.
After 20 plus years in executive recruiting you start to see a pattern of reasons for leadership changes. Here are a few of the most common indicators:
New PE Deal – A public company is looking to shed a non-core division and sells the “carve-out” business to a private equity firm. These deals always seem to work out very well for the new financial sponsors and this deal announcement is an almost certain trigger to build a new leadership team.
Newly Appointed CEO – A new CEO is announced and within 12 to 18 months on average more than half of the leadership team will be replaced. This concept works one-level down as well. A new CFO will have a new financial officer team within 12 to 18 months, etc.
Late-Stage VC Investment – A start-up company receives a late-stage VC investment of $50 million. At this point, the company starts to fully build out the infrastructure and regulatory framework needed to achieve its growth and strategic goals. Think of roles like Chief Accounting Officer, Chief Risk Officer, General Counsel, and Chief People Officer as roles that are often upgraded or established post a large late-stage VC funding round.
Company Emerging from Chapter 11 – The team that takes a company through chapter 11, the turn-around group, is not the same leadership team that focuses on growth post emergence.
Company Caught Flat-Footed – Julie is a star Chief Marketing Officer for BlueVision Tech Corp. She is identified and recruited away to become the CEO of a well-funded VC backed start-up. BlueVision Tech is caught flat-footed and quickly commences a search for Julie’s replacement as the internal team is not yet ready for promotion.
New Stage of Growth – Building a company from idea stage/pre-revenue to $1 to $5 million in revenue is a unique skill, as is scaling a company from $5 million to $20 million + in revenue. Here are the most common revenue hurdles where a new type of leadership is needed for the scale involved:
Did you know the Lead5 Platform identifies these types of scenarios combined with the crowd-sourcing power of the Lead5 community to uncover hidden opportunities and companies you should be pro-actively networking with?
Join today and discover the power of the Lead5 Community to help advance your executive career!
Want to learn more? Join the market discussion on Lead5 here:
Members of the Lead5 Executive Community have frequently asked us about executive assessments, which have become standard in the executive recruiting process. In this video, Peter Thies from the River Group has joined Lead5 CEO, Josh Wimberley, to discuss assessments, including the best way for executives to approach them. The extended video can be viewed in the Lead5 Executive Community forum section where you can ask questions about assessments, or anything else career-related.
Did you know Lead5 has a unique company list feature that you will not find online or with any other database? For these lists, Lead5 focuses on US based companies that are actively recruiting executive level talent because these are the companies that are seeking the men and women who comprise the Lead5 member base.
As a busy executive, you probably don’t realize how many companies in your area are seeking executive-level professionals. That’s because every area has a handful of well-known companies, but there are many high-growth and successful companies that often fall under the radar. Additionally, most executive jobs are hidden or unlisted. At Lead5, we strive to provide you with company lists that give you the full picture of the companies hiring executives in your particular function and region. This empowers your ability to conduct proactive outreach, putting you in the driver seat of your next career move.
Here’s an example of how you can use Lead5’s company lists:
Let’s say you are a healthcare-focused CFO who wants to remain in Atlanta. There are 27 companies in the Lead5 database when you filter for region ‘Atlanta’ and select industry ‘Healthcare Services + HealthTech’ that are private equity backed, and another 17 that are privately held with no institutional backing. Do research and become familiar with those companies. Learn about the cultures of those companies through networking. If you have been in the same market for some time, you will be amazed at how quickly you can connect with someone who knows the inside story or culture of the company.
Lead5 also shows you that 6 private equity deals have taken place in the last 12 months in the Atlanta market in Healthcare Services + HealthTech. Did you know that when a PE firm acquires a majority stake in a new company, that 70% of the time they replace the CFO within 12 months of the deal? PE deals are important hiring indicators for most C-level functions.
What about a newly appointed CEO? New CEOs will likely restructure their leadership team within the first 12 months on the job. With Lead5 you can track and monitor new CEO appointments for companies in your industry and region. Lead5 has recommendations for how to approach a new CEO directly or through networking contacts. Timing is key and Lead5 gives you an edge for how and when to make these connections.
Here is a breakdown of the companies we cover at Lead5:
This mix gives our members a broad lens into the executive hiring landscape across company ownership types and market caps, allowing our members to target companies that are perfect fits for their career elevation strategies.
If you have any questions about how to yield the most value from Lead5 company lists, please email us at support@lead5.com or you can email me directly: josh@lead5.com
Congratulations, you have made it to the C-Suite. You landed your dream job that acknowledges your past professional accomplishments and provides lucrative financial rewards. After celebrating your new milestone, the furthest thing from your mind is to plan the next phase of your career strategy. However, in a dynamic job market, it’s critical that you are continually planning the next move so that in 3 to 5 years you can continue to grow.
By being proactive, and not reactive, in your career strategy will put you and your family in a position of strength and stability, whereas being reactive will mean that you’re acting from a position of weakness which puts you and your family at risk. Being proactive entails looking for opportunities to strengthen your skills, visibility, and relationships and that’s what this blog is about.
I recently caught up with Lead5 advisory board member Bob Collins who has 3 decades of executive leadership in human resources, including leading staffing at top international brands. He shared with me 6 ways to ensure that you are always operating from a position of strength as you continually navigate your executive career.
1. Understand that the 6-month mark is important. As an executive, your first 6 months in your job will require pouring a 100% plus of your energy into your role and ensuring that your first year in the position is a success. Past the 6-month mark, it’s time to widen your lens and invest at least 5% of your energy into your career. At each anniversary date, you should increase this time investment and broaden your focus. Initially, this could mean additional training or education. It could also mean taking on speaking engagements and networking to exchange knowledge with other executives in your field. Importantly, these activities not only will help you deliver results for your current firm, but they will also keep your skills relevant and sharp in the marketplace. It will also allow you to build and strengthen your network of colleagues and expand your visibility to those who could play a vital role in your organizational advancement.
2. Always have a long-term career strategy. You should be continually defining, refining, and working your long-term career strategy. What is the vision of your ideal role? Are you an industry-specific executive or is there a new industry you’d like to pursue? This career plan will help guide the choices you make in your career development and prevent you from becoming complacent or stagnant. Just as successful leaders believe that every business plan must have a viable talent plan that describes how the plan is to be implemented, a thoughtful career strategy needs to have a business plan on how to achieve the stated objectives with the required skills to execute it. The time to determine your skill gaps is now before the next phase of career strategy unfolds.
3. Be marketable even if you’re not in the marketplace. This starts with taking on challenges that align with your career plan. For example, if you’re a CFO with a Fortune 500 firm and you aspire to become a Fortune 100 CFO, a good place to start is networking with Fortune 100 CFOs and doing a gap analysis between your skills and theirs. Obviously, it will take time to close any gaps and that’s why this career plan is a long-term – not short-term – strategy. Being marketable also entails continually optimizing your CV, sharing expertise with those who need it, and sharing thought leadership either by speaking engagements or written publications. Strive to become the person people in your field want to know because of the success you are creating for your company. Also, cultivate your desire to learn and stay on the cutting edge of your field so that you are consistently advancing the profession in the most critical areas.
4. Develop a continual networking strategy. With your current career demands, it’s not feasible to network with every contact that you have. But you can take a look at your most important contacts and segment them. Who are the contacts you should be reaching out to once a month for lunch or simply exchanging emails? Who are the contacts you should reach out to once a quarter? What you don’t want to do is wait until you need them and then start reaching out to contacts you haven’t communicated with for years. Lead5 is a service that provides executives with key executive contacts. Lead5 also informs its members when important hires like CEOs are made. That’s a good time for you to do some outreach, sending a short note to a newly appointed CEO, congratulating him/her and mentioning that one day you’d love to share how you can help.
5. Don’t be complacent. The average tenure for a C-suite executive is 3-5 years at the same company. While things could be going extremely well for you now, recognize that all companies have downturns, leadership shifts, and ownership changes. While it’s your duty to pour your energy into making your firm a success, don’t neglect yourself in the process. The most successful executive always carves out time to invest in themselves. As I mentioned above, this benefits your current firm and it keeps you relevant in the marketplace.
6. Don’t neglect development opportunities within your current firm. Executives too often believe that to get ahead that they must switch firms. While that is sometimes the case, remember that your current firm appointed you for a reason. While you’re helping your current firm achieve its mission, make a point to find allies who champion your long-term career vision (assuming that this vision is aligned with the company vision, of course). This will open up doors at your current firm that help you proactively achieve your career plan.
Key Takeaways:
As an executive, if you’re not continually proactive in your career approach, then you’re in a reactive state which puts you in a position of weakness.
How do you shift into this proactive state and position of strength? As detailed above, look for opportunities that improve your skills, visibility, and relationships. These three things will keep you highly marketable as you continue to evolve on your leadership path.
Use Lead5 to uncover hidden executive opportunities and gain the intel required to land your next prominent role. Lead5 has been the executives trusted partner for 5 years.
Start your complimentary trial today.