You’re in “The Strategy Gap”.

Your direction is plausible. The strategy behind it needs rebuilding before more action.

What this score means

There’s a real chance here — you wouldn’t be scoring in this band if there weren’t — but the current approach is unlikely to convert in its present form. More applications, more hours, and more conversations aren’t the answer yet. The strategy behind them needs work first.

The most common mistake in this band is accelerating. People in Strategy Gap often respond to slow progress by doing more of the same thing faster, which compounds the wrong pattern instead of fixing it.

⬆︎⬆︎SCREEN GRAB YOUR SCORE CARD⬆︎⬆︎

Where the leverage sits

Firstly, if you haven’t got a clear role focus or clarity around the criteria you can use to say no more quickly, then start there. Without those, everything becomes so much harder

For people in this band, the fix usually sits across two or three of these:

- The Visible Credibility Gap. The work you’re relying on to convince the market probably isn’t yet doing that job. Before more outreach, rebuild what you have in terms of signals that you are worth speaking to.

- The Overlaps Map. Your positioning may be reaching too far across client type, org stage, or product/service type. Finding a closer anchor point usually opens doors faster than a bigger leap.

- The Demand Mirror. Your model of what the market actually wants may be partly imagined. Before more applications, confirm real hiring patterns through conversations and market analysis— not job ads.

The sections you scored lowest on are the most important to look at first. That’s where the repositioning starts.

Suggested focus

Pause the active search for a few weeks. Use that time to rebuild your positioning, your proof, and your map of the market. It’s counterintuitive, but almost everyone in this band who skips this step ends up back here six months later.

Want to talk this through? Your diagnostic gives us a starting point. A 30-minute call turns it into a plan.

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60 minutes, live, with Q&A. Leave with your next step clear.

Your Score Card - Explained

  • How sharply you've defined your target: the sector, the role, and the archetype of the person who'd be hiring you. Without this, every other dimension has nothing to test against — you can't measure credibility against a target you haven't named.

  • How testable your criteria are for "this is the right opportunity." The difference between "I'll know it when I see it" and a written list you could hand to a friend and ask them to filter roles on your behalf.

  • Whether you're changing what you do (content — role, function, skillset), where you do it (context — sector, organisation type, stage), or both at once. Dual shifts aren't impossible, but they need a different playbook and usually take longer.

  • The distance between the credibility you actually have and what's visible to an employer in the first 30 seconds of reading your CV or LinkedIn. This isn't about what you can do — it's about what they can see that you can do.

  • Your transferability across three axes: client type, organisation stage, and product-service type. Most people assume they lack relatable experience. This map shows you were you might find more overlap than you expect

  • Whether the market actually wants what you're offering, in the quantities and at the rates you need. Plenty of valid pivots stall here because the target role exists in smaller numbers — or at lower salary — than assumed.

  • How close you are to the people who make hiring decisions in your target space. Roles at this level rarely come from cold applications — they come through one or two degrees of separation, which means your community is load-bearing.

  • The relationship between your financial runway (how long you can afford the search) and realistic time-to-land at the pace you can work at it. Underestimating the second half of this equation is the single most common mistake in mid-career pivots.

  • How much you actually care about where you're heading. Pivots take nine to eighteen months of real, sustained effort. The motivation has to be more durable than "I'm unhappy here" — it has to be positive pull, not just negative push.