Job prospects looking bleak? Not if you’re in the corner office

Despite a job market that is increasingly challenging for most jobseekers, executive roles abound

THE DOUBLE-WHAMMY OF the age of forever layoffs is that things are not necessarily coming up Milhouse in the job market these days. Find yourself out of a job, and it might be a while before you land yourself back in a similar role.

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That is, unless you’re in the corner office. “At the top of the corporate ladder, openings remain plentiful. C-suite executives are still being actively recruited,” reads a report from Bloomberg News reporter Rachel Phua. “A mix of burnout, retirement and performance pressure is driving some of the churn, while activist investors, artificial intelligence adoption and a pickup in deals are also prompting boards to rethink who they want at the helm.”

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So, as Business Insider puts it, CEOs are not job-hugging like the rest of us. The numbers back this up, with the average tenure of CEOs, which peaked at 8.4 years, having now dropped to only 7.2 years as CEOs are shuffled in and out with increasing frequency, according to data from Russell Reynolds Associates.

This dynamic is affecting the Canadian job market as well, says executive consultant David Wexler. “While I can’t speak to the broader market, in the segment where I concern myself, which is working with [Canadian] executives in career transition, the market is currently very active,” he wrote on LinkedIn recently. “Not only are executives landing faster, many are receiving offers from multiple prospective employers in the process.”

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Executive search firms, he added, are doing well and are working at full capacity, and candidates at the top are taking advantage of that.

So, if you’re reading this from the corner office, contemplating a career move, perhaps the time is right. On the other hand, if you’re reading this after receiving your 900th automated job screening email, your reaction might be less positive — and with an added dose of profanity (hey, we aren’t judging).

“As the old saying goes,” John Hopkins business professor Richard Smith told Business Insider, “it’s good to be at the top.” Kieran Delamont