How the work runs, week by week
Intake, sourcing, submission inside five days, and two tracked follow-ups on every role. Here is the whole sequence.
Before day one
The intake call produces one document, and it is the document everything else is measured against. It records the level you are going for, the function, the kind of company, the compensation floor you will not go below, the locations that work, and your work authorisation. It is written down because a target you can read back is a target I can be held to.
If you cannot answer those six things yet, the intake call will tell you that, and the honest outcome is that you are not ready to buy this. I would rather find that out in twenty minutes than in month two.
The weekly cadence
| Week | What happens |
|---|---|
| One | Intake, target agreed in writing, sourcing begins. You get the first shortlist and see it before anything is sent. First applications go in, each with its own resume variant. Your tracker goes live. |
| Two | Day four and day eight follow-ups land on week one roles, to both the hiring manager and the recruiter. New roles sourced and submitted on the same five-day window. |
| Three | First review point. We look at what the shortlist has produced and whether the target needs narrowing or widening. Nothing changes in the target without you agreeing to it. |
| Four | Target adjusted if the evidence says so. Resume variants revised where a pattern is visible in which roles are and are not producing replies. |
| Every week after | The same sequence. Sourcing, a variant per posting, submission inside five days, day four and day eight follow-ups, everything recorded against the role. |
What I need from you
Four things. If you cannot give me the second one, the work has nothing to aim at.
- Your history, in whatever state it is in
- An existing resume, a profile, or a list of roles and dates. It does not need to be tidy. Rewriting it is my job, and the per-posting variants come out of it.
- A decision on the target
- The six items from the intake document. If two of them are still open, we can work through it on the call, but a search cannot start against an undecided target.
- About two hours in the first week
- The intake call, then reviewing the first shortlist and telling me which roles you do not want. After week one the time drops sharply, because the sequence is running.
- A same-day reply when something lands
- When a recruiter or a hiring manager responds, the reply window is short and it is yours, not mine. This is the one part I cannot do for you.
Reposted and stale postings
A posting that has been live for six weeks and a posting that went live yesterday are not the same opportunity, and they do not get the same treatment. The five-day window exists because a role that has just opened has a shorter queue in front of it. Roles already well past that window get applied to only when the fit is strong, and the outreach leads rather than follows, because the application is arriving late and needs a reason to be looked at.
Reposted roles get flagged in the tracker rather than quietly resubmitted. A repost can mean the search restarted, the budget changed, or the requirement moved. It is worth knowing which before spending an application on it, so where I can tell, I record what I think happened and why.
When nothing is landing
Sometimes four weeks of correct execution produces very little. When that happens the tracker is the diagnostic, because it separates the possible causes. Applications going in but no replies at all points at the target or the resume. Replies but no first calls points at the screening stage. First calls but nothing after points at something the search cannot fix, and you should know that rather than pay me to keep going.
I will tell you which of those the data looks like. I will not tell you it is a numbers game and ask for another month.
What I do not do
- Decide your career direction. The target comes from you. I execute against it.
- Send anything before you have seen the shortlist it came from.
- Apply to roles outside the agreed target to raise the count.
- Sit the interviews, or promise you a number of them. The process is what I sell and the tracker is how you check it.
Where to start
Twenty minutes. I will walk the cadence through against your actual target and tell you where it will help and where it will not. If the answer is that you should keep running your own search, that is what you will hear.