#47 The level is an output, not a target
Most people start a senior search by protecting a number. The comp they're on, the level they've reached — those become the floor, and the search turns into a hunt for roles that clear it.
Reasonable. Also backwards.
When the level is the target, you aim at the label. You filter for the title, screen for the band, and end up interviewing for roles you can technically do at a company you'll technically tolerate. You clear the bar. And six months in, you're running the same search again, because "the right level" turned out to be the wrong work.
The clients who land somewhere that fits do it in the other order. They get specific about the work first — the kind of problem they want to own, the altitude they want to operate at, the kind of team they do their best work inside. Only then do they look at what that work is worth.
Every time someone tells me they can't really negotiate, I point at Cash.
Cash is the money tree sitting behind me. A client sent it after he landed an extra $80,000 on his offer — and he didn't get there by pushing on the number at the end.
He got there over the course of the whole process. Every conversation, he asked better questions than he needed to. What does this person have to be outstanding at? What's actually broken here? What happens if it doesn't get fixed? By the final stage he understood the role better than the document they'd written to describe it — because he'd been listening for the gap between what they'd asked for and what they kept telling him they needed.
So when it came to it, he could say: you've said you need X, but the real problem is Y — and I'm the person who can deliver that.
It landed, because every piece of evidence for it had come out of their own mouths.
That's not a negotiating tactic. It's what becomes available to you when you're chasing the work instead of the level. Aim at the band and you spend the process proving you deserve it. Aim at the problem and you spend the process understanding it — and end up seeing it more clearly than the people who wrote the job spec.
That's what you get paid for. Not the title you're asking for. The problem you can already see.
One thing to try this week: write down the last role you were genuinely energised by — not the most senior one, the most right one. What was the problem? Who were you working with? What were you deciding? That description is your real target. The level is just what it costs to hire someone who does that well.
Chat soon,
Mel
P.S. This is why "I'll take anything at the right level" is such a trap. It optimises for the one variable that's meant to be the output — and leaves the input, the actual work, to chance.