Changing Career Paths

Welcome to Headhunter Secrets, where I’ll share perspectives about the search business. We hope you’ll use our services to execute searches. Nonetheless, I wanted to give you some insights I’ve gained from doing search work since I was 23 years old.

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Changing Career Paths
There‘s a trick to it

Over the years, several people from investment banking, public accounting and management consulting have asked me to help them switch into the operating company world. 

The investment bankers get tired of the long hours, grind and constant rebooting of their fee generation scorecard. The public accounting folks would rather work toward helping create the score than checking the score. And the consultants get tired of giving companies suggestions on how to improve things only to see their clients not follow through.  

If only they could transition to the operating company side, where they could be part of actually growing a company’s value rather than functioning as a well-paid service professional. 

This ambition is admirable. It can be challenging and might require patience. But there’s a trick to increase your likelihood of success. 

First, there’s what not to do. If you apply to every job posting you see, don’t get your hopes up. This approach rarely gets a response from the company looking to hire. More often than not, your application is filed away in a system that looks like the last scene in the Raiders of the Lost Ark, where a warehouse worker wheels the crated Ark into an enormous sea of identical crates, implying it will be hidden away indefinitely, lost in bureaucracy. 

Secondly, don’t expect a headhunter to help you change career paths. Companies pay headhunters, so headhunters are motivated to find the candidate best matched to the company’s needs. Rarely is the perfect match from the company and headhunter’s perspective someone looking to make a career path change. 

Then there’s what to do. To make a career path change, mine your relationship network. Focus your search on the people who know your skillsets, personality, values, work habits and so much about you that they think, I know this person well enough to feel confident they can make a career transition.

Such people are going to be your past coworkers, your current and past clients, your vendors, people who you’ve sat on a board with, people who have known you through a professional association, maybe through church or some other environment where you interacted with them meaningfully.

The better someone knows you, the more likely they are to go to bat for you when pursuing a career change. Think about it this way: Would you hire someone you don’t know to do something the person has never done before? If it goes wrong, you take the blame. 

Anytime someone asks me about a career change, I share that, in my experience, 90%+ of those who made the switch did so through a personal relationship.  

What about the rest? Buyer beware.

If a company is willing to hire someone making a career change they don’t know, it can often suggest that no one already in the industry wants to work at that company. It suggests that people in the industry know this company’s skeletons in the closet.

If you find yourself considering such a company and think it’s at least a way to get your foot in the door of the operating company world, proceed with caution. You may forever be associated with a company others in the industry don’t respect, which could hurt your future prospects.  

There’s one other scenario where one can make a career path change without the help of a personal contact. It’s when an industry is going through a “gold rush” period. In such periods, companies are desperate for hires and often can’t find enough from the industry. Such hires tend to be made later in the gold rush hiring spree.

Gold rush environments can make for great opportunities to make a career change. Just beware that every gold rush experiences a bust sooner or later. When they go bust, the layoffs tend to be LIFO, last in, first out. That said, being laid off due to a gold rush bust isn’t usually taken as a lack of judgment and therefore doesn’t usually carry stigma.   

Build positive relationships. Nurture them. Do favors for others. You just might need a favor from them one day, too, if you get an itch for a career change. 

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Hope these insights are helpful. 

We at Leyendecker have been doing search work for 40 years. We’ve completed over 100 C-level searches, most for CFOs. Most have been PE portfolio companies, but we’ve also helped owner/managed and publicly-held companies. Our placements have helped their employers go through almost 50 successful liquidity events.  

Keep us in mind when you seek talent that will get you over the goal line! Hope you have a great year!

Doug