Once Jim and I were speaking about my interviews, and how I had recently received a rejection from Amagi - a company I really wanted to work with, and could make a difference in. After hearing me out, Jim commented that usually a company, when it starts looking for leaders, has a laundry list of criteria. It is worse than typical recruiting - because they know leadership hiring is critical. This laundry list of criteria, when looked together, seems to indicate that they are looking for a unicorn. As the company goes through candidates, it realizes that this unicorn doesn't exist. That's when they are forced to make choices on which criteria are most important to them. This process of searching for a unicorn, interviewing, realization that unicorns don't exist, prioritizing/making tradeoffs of requirements, and then re-interviewing - takes time. One would expect leadership recruiting firms such as Spencer Stuart or Korn Ferry to help shape such requirements. But often it doesn't happen.
This makes it important to have the right timing of entering the process. Enter too early, and you are likely to get rejected because you aren't the unicorn everyone wants - management team, board, investors, team members, etc. Enter too late, and you are one of the many they have already seen.
Unfortunately, one cannot time the entry into a process, but that's where networking and referral can help. As the company goes through it's interviewing motions, staying in touch with the founders/CEO, can some time result in the company coming back and reconsidering you.
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