Just keeping an eye: why senior professionals drift into their next role
I have asked senior professionals the same question for close to two decades. Are you actively looking, or just keeping an eye?
Unless they are between roles, the answer barely changes. Just keeping an eye. Open to the right thing. Not really looking, but you never know.
So I ask a second question. Have you applied for anything, or had a serious conversation about a role, in the last few months?
Most have.
Those two answers do not match. And the space between them is a dangerous place to sit.
This is not a hunch
At the moment I am running five confidential 45-minute career conversations a week with PCF holders and senior people across regulated financial services. They are not tied to any role or search. Alongside those, research is under way asking professionals in the sector where they think they are in their career, and then what they have actually done.
I am not going to quote percentages. What I will say is that this is real information from real people, and the same pattern turns up in both. People describe themselves as passive.
Their behaviour says they are in the market.
Why "just keeping an eye" exists
"Looking" feels like an admission. It suggests something is wrong, and most people at this level do not want to say that out loud: to a recruiter, to a colleague, or to themselves. So they reach for something safer. It keeps the door ajar without committing to anything.
The trouble is that it describes a position almost nobody is actually in. Someone who has taken the call, explored the role properly and gone to interview is not keeping an eye. They are in the market. They just have not decided that they are.
What being half in costs you
When you have not decided, you entertain opportunities on a random basis. Whatever lands in your inbox decides what you consider. That costs headspace, and it is neither deliberate nor purposeful.
It also leaves you underprepared at exactly the wrong moment. You take calls without knowing your number, so you cannot tell a good offer from a polite one. You have not read your contract, so notice, covenants and deferred pay become surprises at the point you can least afford them. Your CV is a year old. And because you have told yourself you are only keeping an eye, you are not preparing, which means the first thing that lands shapes your decision rather than you shaping it.
One thing comes up again and again in the conversations: people already in process for a role who could not describe, in a sentence, the role they would actually say yes to.
This is how good people end up in jobs they do not really want. Not because they made a bad decision. Because they never really made one.
In regulated roles the stakes are higher. Regulatory references, Fitness and Probity evidence, CBI approval timelines and what you would forfeit by leaving all take longer than people expect. None of it gets fixed in the week the right call arrives.
See where you actually are
I built a short questionnaire to make that gap visible. It takes about three minutes, most questions are a single tap, and it asks for no personal information. It asks where you think you are, then what you have actually done, and if the two do not line up, it tells you. You see your results straight away, rated across clarity, market position, your record, references and evidence, and your exit position.
In or out
The fix is not complicated. Decide.
Either you are moving, in which case act like it. Know what you would say yes to, know your number, read your contract, get your record in order. Or you are staying, and you build your position on purpose so that staying is a choice and not a default.
Both are perfectly good answers. Drifting between the two is not.
If you are the one hiring
The same applies from the other side of the table. The professional who told you they were not looking and then took your call has not said no. Taking the call was the answer. Treat it as one, and come prepared to talk about their position as well as your role.
Where advice should start
Most career support is built around a single moment: the job board, the CV rewrite, the salary survey. Very little of it starts by finding out where someone actually is, which is the only place useful advice can begin. I think that is the wrong starting point, and I am building on the assumption that it is.
If the right call landed this week, would you be ready for it?
The questionnaire will tell you in three minutes, with no email needed to see your results. If you want to go further, there is a free, tailored report, put together and reviewed by me, so that one does need an email to reach you. Start the questionnaire
And if you would rather talk it through, I keep five 45-minute conversations a week for exactly this. Confidential, no agenda, no pitch. Email me at paul@nexussearch.io.
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