Elite Edge | Vol 2 Week 41

You've seen it happen.

A role opens at a company you love. The title is perfect. The scope is perfect. You spend Sunday night tailoring your résumé, writing the cover letter, triple-checking every keyword.

You hit submit on Monday morning.

And by Wednesday, someone on LinkedIn is posting "Thrilled to announce I've joined..." for that exact role.

You didn't lose to a better application. You lost to a conversation that happened weeks before the posting went live.

Last week I told you your name is already on a spreadsheet, the one where companies decide who stays in 2027. This week, I want to show you the other list. The short one. The list of names a hiring manager writes down the moment a new role is approved, before HR writes a single word of the job description.

In 25 years of executive search, I can tell you exactly how that list gets made. And I can tell you that almost nobody on it got there by clicking "Easy Apply."

Let's go.

🔍 The Breakdown: The Secret Life of a Job (Before You Ever See It)

Here's what happens inside most companies between "we need someone" and "we posted the role":

Stage 1: The need appears. A leader quits. A new initiative gets funded in the 2027 plan. A new executive arrives and wants their own team. Right now, in budget season, this is happening everywhere. Some roles are getting cut, and others are being created.

Stage 2: "Who do we know?" This is the first question every hiring manager asks. Not "what should the job description say?" They think of people they've worked with, people who've impressed them, people someone they trust has vouched for. If your name comes up here, you are already ahead of every applicant who will ever see the posting.

Stage 3: Internal and referred candidates get the first look. Internal moves, employee referrals, and the hiring manager's own network get worked first, because they're faster, cheaper, and less risky.

Stage 4: The recruiter's network. If the role is senior or hard to fill, a recruiter or search firm gets called. And here's what I do on day one of every search: I call the people I trust and ask, "Who's the best person you know for this?" The names that come up on those calls go to the top of my list.

Stage 5: The posting. By the time the job hits LinkedIn or Indeed, there's often already a frontrunner. Sometimes the posting is real and wide open. Sometimes it's there for compliance, because the policy says every role gets posted even when the hire is nearly done. And sometimes there is no job at all.

Here's the part that matters: you have the most influence in Stages 2 through 4. Stage 5 is where everyone else is.

📊 The Real Numbers (And One Myth I Need to Kill)

You've probably seen the stat that "70 to 80% of jobs are never posted." I hear it constantly. I went looking for the research behind it, and I couldn't find a solid study. It gets repeated far more than it gets proven.

But the real data tells a story that's honestly more damning:

• Referrals are about 1.6% of applications but about 17% of hires, according to Gem's 2025 recruiting benchmarks across millions of applications.

• Internal candidates are about 0.3% of applications but about 12.6% of hires in that same data.

• Referred candidates get from application to interview about 40% of the time, versus about 12% for people who apply cold, per Ashby's hiring data.

• Job boards bring in about 60% of applications but only about 37% of hires, per CareerPlug's study of more than 10 million applications.

• Roughly 1 in 5 job postings has no active hiring behind it, according to Greenhouse's platform data.

Read that again. The channel where almost everyone applies is the channel with the worst odds. The channels almost nobody uses are where the hires come from.

That's not because the system is fair to insiders. It's because hiring managers are buying down risk. A referral is someone saying, "I'll put my name on this person." A posting is a stack of strangers.

📕 The Unwritten Rules

Rule 1: Jobs go to the people who are remembered, not the people who are qualified. Being great at your job is the entry fee. Being top of mind when the need appears is what gets you the call.

Rule 2: The best time to network is when you don't need anything. If the first time someone hears from you in three years is "Hey, are you hiring?", you're making a withdrawal from an account you never deposited into.

Rule 3: Nobody refers a résumé. They refer a story. When someone puts your name forward, they're going to say one or two sentences about you. If you haven't given them those sentences, they'll make something up, or they won't say anything at all.

Rule 4: Recruiters can only call people they can find. If your LinkedIn says "Experienced professional passionate about driving results," you are invisible. Recruiters search for specific titles, skills, industries and outcomes.

Rule 5: Weak ties open more doors than best friends. Your closest friends know the same people and hear about the same jobs you do. The former colleague you haven't talked to in two years? They're connected to a whole world you can't see.

Rule 6: Generosity compounds. The people who get the most calls are the people who make the most introductions. When I'm running a search, I remember who sent me great people. Those are the first people I call when their kind of role opens.

🚩 Red Flags That You're Invisible to the Hidden Market

• Most of your job search time goes into applying online.

• You haven't had a real conversation with someone outside your company in 30 days.

• No recruiter has reached out to you in the last six months.

• Your LinkedIn headline is your current title and nothing else.

• You can't name five people at companies you'd want to work for.

• You couldn't name three companies in your industry that just raised money.

• Your network is almost entirely people from your current company.

• You only reach out to people when you need something.

• If someone asked a friend "what does she do, exactly?", your friend would struggle to answer.

If you checked three or more, this issue is for you. And the good news? Every one of these is fixable in the next 30 days.

🛠️ The Elite Edge Playbook, Part 1: Exactly How to Find the Jobs Nobody Posts

Most advice stops at "go network." That's useless if you don't know who to network with or why now. So I'm going to give you the exact system I'd use if I were looking for my next role this week. It's a two-part playbook. This week: how to find the jobs before they exist. Next week: exactly what to say to the people who will create them.

Step 1: Define Your Lane (15 Minutes)

You can't hunt if you don't know what you're hunting. Write down five things:

1. Industry: the one or two sectors where your experience is worth the most (fintech, healthcare, cybersecurity, consumer, etc.).

2. Function: what you do (sales, finance, product, marketing, operations, people).

3. Level: the title you're going for next, not the one you have now.

4. Location: cities, or remote.

5. Company stage: this is the one most people skip, and it matters most.

Here's my cheat sheet on stage, from 25 years of placing leaders:

• Series A: 20 to 60 people. Still building the product. They hire builders and doers, and the founder still does a lot of the hiring personally.

• Series B: they found something that works and now they need to scale it. This is when the first real department heads get hired: the first VP of Sales, the first Head of Marketing, the first real finance leader.

• Series C and D: scaling into a real company and often getting ready for an IPO or acquisition. They "professionalize": CFOs, General Counsel, Heads of People, RevOps, international leaders, and people who have "done this before at a bigger company."

If you've spent your career at large companies, Series C and D is often your sweet spot. They want your big-company playbook, and they can afford you.

Step 2: Follow the Money (Your Weekly Funding Scan)

Here's the single most powerful move in this entire issue: when a company raises money, the hiring plan comes next. Investors don't fund a Series B so the company can sit still. They fund it to grow, and growth means people. Most of that money will be spent on salaries.

And here's the timing: the money is announced today, but most of the roles it pays for won't be posted for weeks or months. That gap is your window.

How to do it in Crunchbase:

1. Go to crunchbase.com and create an account. The free plan lets you look up companies, but the search filters you need are on Crunchbase Pro, which has a 7-day free trial. Do your big search during the trial week. (Pro is $49/month billed annually or $99 month to month if you keep it.)

2. Click Search, then Companies.

3. Add these filters:

   • Last Funding Type: Series B, Series C, Series D

   • Last Funding Date: the last 90 days (go up to 6 months if your industry is small)

   • Industry: your sector from Step 1

   • Headquarters Location: your city or region (skip this if you're open to remote)

   • Number of Employees: 51 to 1,000 is a good starting range

4. Save the search and turn on alerts, so new companies that match show up without you doing anything.

5. Go through the results and pick your Target 25. Only keep companies where you'd genuinely be excited to work and where your experience obviously fits.

No budget for Crunchbase? Free ways to follow the money:

• Crunchbase News publishes "The Week's 10 Biggest Funding Rounds" every week. Read it every Friday.

• Set Google Alerts for phrases like "raises Series B" + [your industry] and "raises Series C" + [your industry].

• SEC EDGAR (sec.gov/edgar/search): U.S. companies raising private money have to file a public "Form D" within 15 days of their first sale of shares, often before the press release.

• Follow 10 investors in your industry on LinkedIn. They post every time a portfolio company raises.

Step 3: Read the Tea Leaves (10 Minutes per Company)

For every company on your Target 25, play detective. You're looking for the role they'll need but haven't posted yet.

• Read the funding announcement. Look for the "use of funds" line. "Expand our go-to-market team" means sales and marketing leaders. "International expansion" means regional leaders. "Prepare for IPO" means finance, legal, and investor relations. "Scale our platform" means engineering and product.

• Look at their careers page. What's open tells you what they need. What's missing tells you even more. If they're hiring 15 sales reps and there's no VP of Sales, who is going to lead those 15 people? That role is coming.

• Click the "People" tab on their LinkedIn company page. Who's in your function? If the most senior person in marketing is a manager, there's a leadership gap.

• Check for brand-new executives. A new CEO, CRO, or CFO who joined in the last 3 months will almost always build their own team. A new leader is a future hiring manager.

• Read the CEO's LinkedIn posts. Founders announce their priorities in public all the time. Whatever they keep talking about is what they'll be hiring for.

Write down one sentence per company: "I think they need ___ because ___." That sentence becomes your outreach, and next week I'll show you exactly how to use it.

Step 4: Go Through the Investors (The Back Door Nobody Uses)

This is my favorite insider move, and almost nobody does it.

The venture firms that just invested in your Target 25 companies want those companies to hire great people fast. It's how they protect their money. So:

1. Check the investors' portfolio job boards. Most major VC firms have a "Jobs," "Talent," or "Portfolio Careers" page on their website listing open roles across every company they've backed. You'll often find roles there that aren't on LinkedIn.

2. Find the firm's talent partner. Many larger firms have someone whose whole job is helping portfolio companies hire, especially for leadership roles. Search LinkedIn for [firm name] + "talent partner" or "head of talent."

3. Introduce yourself to them. One talent partner can put you in front of 30, 50, sometimes 100 companies. That's the most efficient relationship you'll ever build in a job search. (I'll give you the exact script next week.)

Step 5: Find the Right Human

For every company, you need a name. Here's who to go after, depending on the company's size:

• Under 100 people: the founder or CEO. Yes, really. At this size, they're personally involved in senior hires.

• 100 to 1,000 people: the leader you would report to (the CRO if you're in sales, the CFO if you're in finance), plus the Head of Talent or Head of People.

• Bigger companies: the leader you'd report to, a peer on the team, and the internal recruiter who covers your function.

How to find them:

• On LinkedIn, search the company name plus the title (for example: "Acme" CFO). Then check mutual connections. If you share one, ask for an intro first.

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($119.99/month, or $89.99/month billed annually, with a 30-day free trial) lets you filter for people who changed jobs in the last 90 days and people who've posted recently, which tells you who's active and will actually see your message.

• To find an email address, try Hunter.io. The free plan gives you 50 credits a month, which is more than enough for your Target 25. Most companies use a pattern like firstname@company.com, and Hunter shows you which one.

Pro tip: Email beats a LinkedIn message for senior leaders. Their LinkedIn inbox is a disaster. Their email is where they actually work.

Not a Startup Person? The Same Playbook Works at Big Companies.

Funding rounds are the clearest signal, but they're not the only one. At large companies, swap Step 2 for these:

• A new executive was just hired (watch the press releases and LinkedIn announcements). New leaders bring in their own people within their first 6 to 12 months.

• An acquisition was just announced. Integration means new leadership roles.

• A new priority came up on the earnings call. If the CEO keeps saying "AI" or "international," those teams are about to get budget.

• A new office, plant, or region was announced. Someone has to run it.

Then run Steps 3 through 5 exactly the same way.

Your Homework This Week

By next Sunday, have these three things done:

1. Your lane, written down in five lines (Step 1).

2. Your Target 25, in a spreadsheet, with one "I think they need ___ because ___" sentence for each company (Steps 2 and 3).

3. One name at every company, plus at least three VC talent partners (Steps 4 and 5).

That's it. Don't reach out yet. Next week, in Part 2, I'm giving you the exact words: the "you just raised" email, the note to a VC talent partner, the warm intro ask, the follow-up schedule that doesn't make you look desperate, and the 30-minute weekly routine that keeps it all moving.

You've found the door. Next week, we walk through it.

✨ ELITE TOOLS, HACKS & TIPS (New) ✨

Tool of the Week: Crunchbase

You already met it in Step 2, but it deserves its own spotlight, because it's the tool I'd tell every job seeker to try this month.

Crunchbase is a database of millions of companies, with who funded them, how much they raised, when, and who runs them. Investors and salespeople have used it for years to find companies with fresh money. You're going to use it the same way.

What it does for your search:

• Funding filters: search by round (Series B, C, D), date, industry, location, and company size.

• Saved searches with alerts: new companies that match your lane show up without you lifting a finger.

• Company profiles: each one shows the funding history, the investors (your VC talent partner leads!), and often the leadership team.

• Crunchbase News: free funding coverage, including "The Week's 10 Biggest Funding Rounds."

How to use it this week:

1. Start the 7-day free trial on a day you have an hour blocked.

2. Build the search from Step 2 and save it with alerts on.

3. Pick your Target 25 before the trial ends.

4. Decide if you want to keep Pro. If not, the free account plus Crunchbase News and Google Alerts will keep you going.

💵 Free account available. Pro: $49/month billed annually or $99 month to month, with a 7-day free trial. 🔗 https://www.crunchbase.com

📚What I Read This Week…

“FT and Standard Chartered Business Book of the Year Award 2026: the shortlist," Financial Times (October 6, 2026)

Every year, the Financial Times names the best business book of the year, and the shortlist has become one of my favorite reading lists. This year's six finalists were announced on October 6, and one theme jumps off the page.

Here's what jumped out:

• AI dominates. Three of the six finalists are about AI: as a general-purpose tool, as a weapon, and as a forecasting engine.

• Technology has taken over the prize. Five of the last six winners have been books about technology, including last year's winner, The Thinking Machine (about Nvidia and Jensen Huang), and 2024's Supremacy (about the rivalry between AI pioneers).

• The finalists:

  • 1873 by Liaquat Ahamed: the first Great Depression, with eerie parallels to today's global tensions.

  • Off the Scales by Aimee Donnellan: the inside story of Ozempic and the race to cure obesity.

  • The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the quest for superintelligence.

  • Project Maven by Katrina Manson: the secret Pentagon plan to bring AI to the battlefield with help from Silicon Valley.

  • Blood Will Flow by Alex Perry: the deadly consequences of oil and gas exploration.

  • Prophecy by Carissa Véliz: our obsession with prediction, from ancient oracles to AI.

My read: this list is a map of what's on every CEO's mind right now. And it lines up perfectly with this week's playbook. Open Crunchbase News on any Friday and you'll see the same story: the biggest funding rounds keep going to AI. The books leaders are reading and the companies investors are funding are telling you the same thing about where the jobs are going.

Here's my challenge to you: pick one book from this list and read it before the holidays. Then use it. When you reach out to a founder at an AI company on your Target 25, "I just finished The Infinity Machine and it made me think about your roadmap" is a far better opener than "I hope this finds you well." Reading what leaders read gives you something real to talk about. That's how conversations start.

Read it here 👇

https://www.ft.com/content/d0b2bf57-56c9-4d49-b721-611fc11df7a4

🎙️What I Listened to This Week… (Podcasts)

🎙️ Another good one from Jefferson Fisher…

Until next week,

You’ve got the Edge. Now sharpen it.

Until next week,

✨ SOME COOL UPDATES ✨

🚀 THE LINKEDIN CHALLENGE: An Update From Week 2

I want to share something with you, because you're the reason it exists.

More than 650 people joined the October Elite Recruiter LinkedIn Challenge.

I'm still a little blown away by that number. But what I'm proudest of isn't the number. It's what's happening inside the community.

People are doing something many of them haven't done in years: rebuilding their LinkedIn profile from soup to nuts. New headlines. Rewritten About sections. Experience that finally shows results instead of a list of job duties. And people who told me on Day 1 that they "don't post" are now creating content on the platform, sharing their expertise, and getting noticed for it.

Every day I see people cheering each other on, sharing wins, and helping each other get unstuck. That sense of community is something I didn't fully expect, and it has been the best part of this whole experience.

So far, so good. And we're only in Week 2.

Here's why I'm telling you all this. This challenge came directly from your feedback. So many of you hit reply to this newsletter and told me some version of the same thing: "I know my LinkedIn needs work, I just never get around to it," or "I don't know what to post." I listened. This challenge was the answer.

And it ties right back to this week's issue. Every move in the playbook above, from the "you just raised" email to the VC talent partner to the warm intro, ends with someone clicking on your name. Your LinkedIn profile is the first thing they'll see.

Missed this round? I'm definitely running it again in Q1 2027. Get on the waitlist now and you'll be the first to know when doors open.

JOIN THE Q1 WAITLIST →

And please keep the feedback coming. Hit reply and tell me what you need next. I read every one, and as you can see, I act on it.

✨ UPCOMING WEBINARS ✨

I Always Have Resources for You.

💼 The Portfolio Career: The Era of the "Company of 1"
Build consulting, advisory, board, fractional, and speaking opportunities, and create multiple streams of income before you need them.

🎯 The Career Game Plan: Tools & Frameworks for Your Promotion (or Pivot)
The unwritten rules around visibility, influence, positioning, and executive presence. If this week's issue hit home, start here.

🚀 How to Land a Job in 60 Days
Templates plus my Elite Career Positioning System™ for your résumé, LinkedIn, networking, personal brand, and job-search strategy.

🎟️ $99 | 60 Minutes | Live Webinar + Q&A

🔗 Register here: https://www.deepalivyas.com/webinar

✨ ELITE RESOURCES ✨

The Modern Career Stack Includes:

✅ The Signal™ — Your one-page executive snapshot that answers: Who are you, what do you do, and why should anyone care?

✅ Your Executive Résumé — Rebuilt to communicate impact, not responsibilities.

✅ Your LinkedIn Profile — Optimized to attract recruiters, opportunities, and inbound interest.

These three artifacts work together to create a clear, compelling professional narrative.

Whether you're networking, interviewing, speaking at conferences, exploring a portfolio career, or preparing for your next executive move, this is the foundation.

🔥 It’s on my ELITE LIST👇🏼

Built for the unstoppable.

The Dell Pro powered by Intel® Core™ Ultra with Intel vPro® adjusts power usage based on how you work, so your battery life never slows you down.

Explore More

🌟 About Me 🤝🏻

🎥  FOLLOW ME

🔥 ELITE RECRUITER ON THE MARCH TO 1 MILLION 🚀

We’re almost there! If you’ve found this newsletter useful, help me scale it:
Share, forward, comment, or repost. Every action gets us one step closer.

Feedback is a Gift

I would love to know what you thought of this newsletter and any feedback you have for me. Do you have a favorite part? Wish I would add something? Felt confused? Please reply and share your thoughts!