Successful on Paper: Work

I’m Job Hunting Again, and This Time I’m Not Chasing the Fancy Title

Priyanka — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 10:31:15 GMT

Today marks the exact two year anniversary of when I was offered and accepted my last corporate role.

I fully expected to stay at the company for much longer and wasn’t planning to be back on the market right now. But since I am, I’ve had some time to reflect on how differently I’m approaching this whole interview process.

The last time I was looking, my questions were pretty simple. Is it a good job title? Does it pay well? And will it look good on my CV?

If the answers were yes to all of them, I applied.

This time around though, I’m looking at jobs in a completely different way. If you haven’t guessed already, the most important thing to me used to be looking and feeling successful. But the reality of it is, being Successful on Paper means nothing if you are miserable deep down.

Having time away from working over the last 6 months or so has really allowed me to develop a better relationship with my career. I can still be ambitious, without my self-worth being tied to achievement and costing me my wellbeing.

The other part of this is of course the market itself. The rules have changed, but it turns out I was still playing by a few of the old ones myself.

Behind the paywall

The rest of this post is where I get honest about my own job hunt, with the real numbers and the boundary I broke along the way. It’s the stuff I don’t share anywhere else, especially while I’m still interviewing.

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Why Is It So Hard to Find a Job Right Now, Even With a Great CV

Priyanka — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 09:30:46 GMT

A couple of Fridays ago, a recruiter reached out to me about a contract role I’d applied for. On paper, I looked like a great fit, so we arranged a call for Monday afternoon.

By Monday, the client had changed their mind about what they were looking for and I’d gone from the perfect candidate to not relevant anymore.

Nothing about me had changed and perhaps in my earlier career, I would have taken this rejection personally and yet I didn’t. Because the job market has changed rapidly and this interaction sums up everything I’m learning along the way to getting my next role.

If you’ve been wondering why is it so hard to get a job right now, you might be playing by the old rules, which, let me tell you, no longer apply.

Companies want people who have fixed the exact problems they have

For most of our careers, transferable skills were the selling point. You’d got results in one industry or for one type of client, so you could do it for another. That was the pitch, and it worked.

Now companies want people who have fixed the exact problem they are trying to resolve. You either have the experience or you don’t and that means the pool of candidates gets smaller as they try to find the unicorn who can hit the ground running from day one.

And look, I get it. Having done senior leadership roles since 2022, I know the immense amount of pressure for businesses to deliver results. For some, they don’t have the time to onboard someone new who has to learn not only the way their business functions but also the tools and ins and outs of their industry.

Senior leaders need to be a player-coaches now

AI is impacting not only the size of the team but also what is expected from each person.

Earlier in my career, getting to Head or Director level meant focusing primarily on the business side of your function, with your team managing the day-to-day deliverables.

The clearest shift I’m seeing now is the rise of the player-coach. Someone who is strategic enough to lead, but still willing (and able) to roll their sleeves up and do the work.

I’ve seen this first-hand while interviewing. More than one company has told me the people they’d hired before were used to managing big teams but weren’t able to be hands-on. On paper, they’d been the right hire but in reality it didn’t work out.

Gone are the days where being senior meant moving away from the doing. Now the market wants both. I’m fortunate enough to have stayed close to the work even though I was in senior leadership but I know that many aren’t that lucky.

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Companies are waiting until they can compare you

It’s common to apply for a job and not hear back for months, if at all. A friend told me she’d got an automated rejection email last week for a job she applied for in June. I’m not surprised.

Multiple conversations with external recruiters and internal talent teams have confirmed that companies are cautious in making a decision because it has to be the right hire (back to those exact skills again).

To add further complication to this, job boards like LinkedIn have made it incredibly easy for candidates to mass apply. Another friend hiring for a junior executive to join her team ended up reposting the role four times before she’d even built a big enough pool to find the right candidates because the ones applying weren’t suitable for multiple reasons (needed sponsorship, not the right level etc).

So what feels like weeks of waiting to hear back from a company often ends up being them waiting for enough of the right candidates to enter the pool so they can compare you vs the others.

Ghosting is now just part of the process

As someone who has been in a long-term relationship since before dating apps became a thing, ghosting has been a big learning curve.

Understandably, if you are mass applying for jobs, don’t expect rejection letters from every single one. That’s a given. But what I wasn’t expecting was to not hear back when you’re in the middle of a process. Some interview processes are brutal too, sometimes up to 6 or 7 stages and even then, you may not hear anything back.

Personally, as an ex-recruiter, I can’t imagine leaving someone hanging without a response. Maybe I’m the only one that thinks it’s common courtesy to give candidates an update when you’ve promised them one. Or perhaps most businesses don’t understand how a frustrated, ghosted candidate will tell more people about their negative experience than someone who, even though they weren’t successful, still got feedback.

Being ghosted is less about you and more about them. Now I just see it as poor company culture and leave it at that.

Send this to the friend who’s been waiting to hear back about a first interview.

Location, location, location

Six years removed from the pandemic and businesses are expecting people in the office. Most expecting 2-3 days attendance in the office, more if you’re a senior leader.

So is the job market bad right now? According to the various posts I’ve seen on LinkedIn this week, hiring has picked up significantly. But only within the M25. Great news for us Londoners, not so much for the rest of the country.

It’s not you, it’s the rules

Just like apps changed dating, AI has changed the way companies hire. And the old rules we’ve all been playing by never took that into account.

There’s no scenario for any of us to reference. For businesses that are hiring and for those of us looking, it’s a whole new way of learning.

Some companies are doing a really good job of it. They’re upfront and honest, and they actually give feedback. But for every company doing it well, there seem to be more that aren’t.

So it’s less about luck and more of a numbers game. Most of the time, you’re not even being rejected by a person, it’s the applicant tracking system (ATS).

Which is why you can’t take it personally. Because it’s not about you.

So, which of the old rules are you still playing by?

I Thought I Was Taking A Break From My Career

Priyanka — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 09:30:48 GMT

When I left my job in February, I thought I was taking a short break from my corporate career. Not exactly a sabbatical and definitely not some great reinvention. Just some time to help me decompress, regroup and figure out what I was doing next. That was the whole plan, if you can even call it one.

I’d spent the last year of my career balancing a demanding senior leadership role while supporting multiple family members battling cancer. By the time February rolled around, I was too exhausted to juggle them both and just knew I needed time to support myself before deciding what to do next.

I wish I could tell you that I had an epiphany. I didn’t. The first month or so passed in a blur, but I guess that’s what happens when you are grieving. You can spend months anticipating the loss of someone you love but you don’t experience it truly until they are gone and then it hits all at once. Again. And again. Until you are drowning so deeply in the grief that it takes you months to swim up for breath.

For me, the first glimpses were in May or at least I thought so.

It had been a few months and I figured it was time to get back to some sense of normality. That’s what you do, isn’t it? You take some time off, dust yourself off and get back in there. And with a CV like mine, it wasn’t long before I started to get interviews.

At first, there was relief. I was offered a lucrative short-term contract role after making it through to the final call with the client, but ultimately turned it down because of some concerns that came up during that conversation.

Then I realised I wasn’t in the right state to go back. There was this deep sense of exhaustion that I couldn’t shake, no matter how long I slept. It wasn’t long before I realised I was still grieving and clearly not in the right headspace.

So I decided to take the summer off. Properly off.

For the first summer in a decade there were going to be no adult responsibilities. Just time to rest and get back to my usual self.

In July I spent a total of 9 days at home and came back with this deep desire to create and share my story. Encouraged by my best friend, I started exploring content creation and dived head first into all things hooks, editing and b-roll. For the first time in a while, I felt the same warm buzz I felt when I initially found SEO at the beginning of my career, and decided to see where that took me. The buzz was short-lived as I realised how much effort it took to be consistent and how keeping up felt like another job in itself.

August started and ended with what felt like a never-ending decluttering session.

I had this innate feeling to review and clear out every element of my life, like I was preparing and creating space for something new. I didn’t know what for, I still don't know, all I knew was I had to do it. It was also during this period that I started Successful on Paper and wrote my first article on adult friendships becoming another admin task. While creating short-form content was challenging, writing long-form was second nature and how I got into marketing in the first place.

Plot twist: apparently “taking some time off” still requires a financial plan

Enjoyed the story so far? Behind the paywall, I'm getting honest about what happens when a short break starts needing a financial plan. The options I'm weighing up, and why the most sensible one is the one my loved ones understand least.