Post 1 · Candidate Audience
Personal, reflective and honest. Approx. 260 words. Link added in the first comment.
Nobody tells you what it actually feels like to be very good at a job that no longer challenges you.
You are not unhappy exactly.
You are just... comfortable. And somewhere underneath that comfort is a quiet voice asking whether comfortable is enough.
I have spoken to hundreds of senior executives over 20 years who were in exactly that place. Performing well. Respected. Stable.
And slowly, privately, going a little bit flat.
Most of them stayed too long. Not because they lacked ambition. Because they lacked information. They did not know what else was out there. They had not spoken to anyone who could tell them honestly whether the grass was actually greener or just a different shade of the same colour.
That is the conversation I exist to have.
Not a sales call. Not a pitch. Just an honest, confidential conversation about where you are, where you want to be and whether there is a gap worth exploring.
Your current employer will never know we spoke. That is not a promise I make lightly. It is the foundation of everything I do.
The right next role does not find you. But it does not have to be this hard to find either.
If any part of this resonates, and you will know if it does. Send me a DM. Everything stays between us.
Post 2 · Personal Story
Opens with a hook that never mentions recruitment. The insight lands at the end. Approx. 320 words.
What I witnessed at OR Tambo last Tuesday 😲
My flight to Cape Town had been delayed three hours. Bad weather. Nothing anyone could do.
I found a corner seat, opened my laptop and got on with some work. Standard delayed flight routine.
About twenty minutes in, the man sitting two seats away from me got a call.
From the conversation it was clear he was senior. His team was dealing with a problem back at the office. Something had gone wrong with a client. Not catastrophic, but serious enough to need his direction.
What happened next stopped me from doing any work for the rest of that delay.
He was loud. Dismissive. Condescending in a way that made the people around us visibly uncomfortable. He spoke to whoever was on that call the way you would speak to someone who had deeply disappointed you, in public, without mercy, with an audience of strangers watching every word.
When he hung up he straightened his jacket, picked up his coffee and went back to his phone like nothing had happened.
I sat there thinking about the person on the other end of that call.
About what it feels like to work for someone who saves their best self for the boardroom and gives everything else to the people below them.
About how many talented people quietly decide to leave not because of the company but because of moments exactly like that one.
And about how many organisations have absolutely no idea that this is happening inside their own walls, because the person doing it interviews exceptionally well.
Character does not change in an airport. It reveals itself there.
Twenty years of executive search has taught me one thing above all else.
The most important question in any senior appointment is not what someone has done. It is who they are when nobody they need to impress is watching.
That is what we look for at Meridian. Every single time.
If you lead a team, you know exactly what I am talking about. And if you are looking for your next role, you deserve to work for someone who already knows the difference.
DM me.