Landing your first, or second or third CEO role can be accelerated through understanding how to best market yourself in a way that most fluidly communicates your value points as well as gaining clarity on what the market best responds to. Here are a few quick tips to help you in your next executive transition:

Tip One: Things are not always what they seem.

According to this article in Harvard Business Review and authored as a collaborative effort by the founders of ghSMART (a C-suite consulting and advisory firm), a 10-year study conducted they conducted called the CEO Gnome Project, uncovered several very interesting points. These included taking a higher title at a smaller company often paid off in the form of fast tracking that executive into a CEO position. Inheriting and turning chaos into order – also paid off. Only 24% of fast track CEOs had elite MBA’s but nearly all of these executives shared that they took big risks before they felt they were ready.

You can read the entire article here.

Tip Two: Be prepared.

It may seem obvious, but having an executive resume, LinkedIn profile, executive biography and even yourname.com for your online presence is a very important part of your career opportunity readiness. Consider that in your executive career – things change fast. Groups or boards may pitch you opportunities out of the blue, there are reorganizations and acquisitions. Additionally, you may find yourself wondering about, open to, or presented with, interim roles, advisory roles or board nominations. For this reason – more executives are using their executive resumes to demonstrate more of a career portfolio. They keep this portfolio resume updated in order to have it handy for various executive level opportunities – so they don’t have to scramble or react when these opportunities arise:

I wrote about that in my recent Forbes article here.

Tip Three: Even CEOs have job search strategies.

It is a mis-guided perception that CEO’s are only pitched opportunities from executive recruiting firms. CEOs and COOs looking for their next opportunity may use a combination of networking contacts, recruiting firms, approaching companies directly and even connections on their LinkedIn profiles to land interviews. I was excited to be included in this LinkedIn Pulse article by Rosa Vargas on top executive job search tips for 2019. Among them are quick, powerful tips covering everything from your LinkedIn profile to storytelling tips, to my topic of choice, leveraging the hidden job market. You can read that article here.

You can find a more detailed list of C-level job search strategies here.

I hope these quick tips help you as you consider your next CEO opportunity, interim, advisory or board role!