Can we talk about the absolute joke that is the traditional recruitment system? Because I am done pretending this antiquated circus makes any sense for professional women who know their worth.
Here’s an incomplete list of everything that’s wrong with this broken system:
The job description is fiction. Half the time it’s a copy-paste from 2019 when Bob down the corridor left and someone thought, “this role looks similar enough, that’ll do.” You apply thinking you understand the role, only to discover it’s completely different once you’re there.
Only 10-30% of roles actually get advertised. The rest? Filled through networks and relationships. So you’re literally competing for scraps whilst the meaningful opportunities happen behind closed doors.
The power dynamic is backwards. They act like they’re doing you a favour by considering you, when the reality is you’re equals who both need something. They need your talent just as desperately as you need their role.
Your CV will never convey your brilliance. Years of strategic thinking, problem-solving genius, leadership magic, all reduced to bullet points and “results-oriented professional” clichés. Give me a break.
You’re competing on performance, not capability. Dozens or sometimes hundreds of people, all assessed on your ability to perform in an artificial interview setting rather than your ability to actually do the job. Because that makes total sense, right?
It’s a one-way interrogation. You get grilled, you get assessed, you jump through hoops. But when do you get to properly investigate whether this company deserves your talent?
I’m getting fired up just writing this because it’s so fundamentally broken.
But here’s what really gets me: brilliant senior professional women keep subjecting themselves to this rigged game when there’s a completely different approach to career advancement coaching.
Stop Playing Their Game. Create Your Own.
This is what strategic career negotiation actually looks like for executive women who are serious about negotiating their worth:
Go after what lights you up. Instead of scrolling job boards hoping something decent appears, identify the people, companies, and industries that genuinely excite you. This is where career negotiation coaching starts, my darling, with clarity about what you actually want.
Build real relationships. Not networking for the sake of networking, but authentic connections with people doing work that matters to you. Women in leadership understand that opportunity flows through relationships, not job boards.
Find out what they actually need. Not what’s posted on their careers page, but what keeps them up at night. What problems are they struggling to solve? This is the foundation of role co-creation.
Position yourself as the solution. When you discover a real need that matches your skills and interests, you’re not competing with hundreds of other candidates. You’re co-creating a role that didn’t exist before.
Negotiate the hell out of it. When you’re the perfect fit for a problem they desperately need solved, you have all the leverage. This is women negotiating their worth from a position of strategic power.
This Isn’t Theory. This Is How Mid-to-Senior Level Women Build Careers.
My clients at Women of Agency do this constantly through our women’s career coaching programme:
The strategy consultant who created a Chief Innovation Officer role at a traditional manufacturing company because she saw they needed digital transformation leadership.
The HR director who became Head of People Experience at a startup because she identified their retention crisis and positioned herself as the solution.
Every week I share their success stories. Our system works for clients who apply these negotiation strategies for women correctly and put in the work. They didn’t wait for job postings. They didn’t submit CVs to black holes. They created opportunities that didn’t exist before.
The Path Forward for Professional Women
This approach requires courage, strategy, and a completely different mindset about how careers work. But when you nail it? You’re not just getting a job, you’re getting your job, designed around what you do best.
The traditional recruitment system isn’t going to fix itself. But you don’t need to wait for it to change.
If you’re ready to stop playing the broken recruitment game and want to learn how to create your own path instead through women’s career negotiation advice that actually works, Women of Agency is here. This is exactly what our executive career coaching for women delivers, and frankly, there’s nothing I love more than watching brilliant women bypass broken systems entirely.
Ready to negotiate your worth? Let’s talk.
