Get Hired by Talking to CTOs Directly. Not by feeding the ATS and hoping HR forwards your CV.

The postings look right. You tailor the CV, write the letter, hit apply. Then nothing, or a rejection from a system that plainly never showed a human your name. And somewhere underneath you already know the real market for someone at your level isn't on those boards at all.

It isn't. Above a certain seniority, roles get filled from a list somebody already trusts, and the posting exists because policy says one has to. By the time you apply, two or three people have been informally sounded out. You're not being rejected so much as arriving after the decision.

So we stop feeding the machine. We build a target list of 10 to 15 companies where a CTO or a VPE could genuinely hire you, and we get you a coffee with the person who owns the headcount rather than the person screening for keywords. The senior tech market in this region runs on coffee, and I know most of the people whose diaries you need.

Sixty days out you should have had three to six real conversations with decision-makers and at least one live path to an offer.

Someone screening on exact title match, a keyword, and a gap in your timeline is deciding whether a Head of Engineering with fifteen years of scars gets a call. The CTO who'd understand you inside five minutes never sees the CV.

The uncomfortable part is that the recruiter isn't wrong to work that way. They're handed 200 CVs and a rubric, and the rubric has no column for judgment. That filter is unbeatable by writing a better CV, which is where most of your effort has gone.

So we go around it. A warm introduction from somebody the CTO already trusts puts your name on their desk directly, and it converts at a rate cold applications never approach, because the trust is borrowed rather than built from scratch. I open my own network where I can, and hand you the intro scripts I use for the ones you'll make yourself.

You stop being a CV in a stack of 200 and start being a person somebody already wants to meet.

Everyone says it's about who you know. Fine. You know your current team and a handful of ex-colleagues. You have no line at all into the CTOs of the fifteen companies you'd genuinely want to work for, and cold messages to strangers feel like begging and convert like spam, because they mostly are spam.

We build the map together: which fifteen companies fit the direction you're going, who holds the decision at each one, and who could introduce you. That last column is the one nobody fills in, and it's usually less empty than people expect once you look properly.

Then I make the introductions I can make, and coach the ones you have to make yourself. You end up with a ranked list, a named decision-maker per company, and a warm path into the few at the top.

Thirty minutes with a VPE, finally. You spend it being pleasant. You describe your current job, you both agree the market is difficult, somebody says let's stay in touch, and nothing happens afterwards. You had the shot and you were too polite to take it.

The reason is almost never nerve. It's that you walked in without a specific ask, so the conversation defaulted to the socially safe ending, which is the one that costs nobody anything.

We rehearse it before you go: your sixty-second story, the two questions that make a CTO think I could use this person, and the one specific ask that converts a friendly chat into a next step. I play the CTO, including the version who is distracted and running nine minutes late, because that's the one you'll get.

After that, every coffee ends with a concrete next move rather than a vague promise to keep in touch.

You keep hearing that the good roles get filled off a list the founder already trusts, well before anything goes public. You'd like to be on that list rather than refreshing job boards after the role has effectively gone.

Getting there is less mysterious than it sounds. It's a portfolio somebody can inspect, a story that holds up in one paragraph, and enough visible proof that a founder can say yes without a committee. Then it's being in the room, repeatedly, when you don't need anything.

We build the first part properly. Then, where the fit is genuine, I put you in front of the CEE hiring channel where senior leaders are matched to companies directly, vouched for by the community, with no recruiter markup on top. You stop chasing postings and start being approached by companies that already trust the source.