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<\/p>\nThere is a conversation we have in almost every coaching mandate, usually somewhere between month three and month five. The client sits down, visibly heavier than in the early sessions, and says a version of the same sentence: “I thought I’d have something by now.”<\/p>\n
The question we ask in return is simple: “What made you think that?”<\/p>\n
The answer is almost never based on data. It is based on a feeling, on the memory of how quickly things moved earlier in the career, on well-meaning friends who said “someone with your profile will be snapped up”, and on an inner deadline that was never realistic in the first place.<\/p>\n
So let us put the actual number on the table.<\/p>\n
According to the current Swiss labour market barometer of the outplacement industry, jobseekers over 50 need an average of 7.3 months to find a new position. That is the longest search duration of any age group, and it is rising. For comparison: even well-educated young professionals now need an average of 3.2 months, up from two months just a year earlier, in a market where recruitment processes have generally slowed and companies scrutinise every replacement more closely.<\/p>\n
Two further figures complete the picture. People over 50 account for 41 per cent of dismissals in Switzerland, although they make up only around a third of the workforce. And the number of registered jobseekers has risen to more than 230’000, with unemployment around ten per cent above the previous year.<\/p>\n
Read together, these numbers describe a market in which experienced professionals are over-represented among those who lose their jobs and under-represented among those who are quickly rehired. That is not a comfortable finding. But for anyone starting a transition, it is far more useful than the encouraging estimates of friends.<\/p>\n
The instinct, when month four passes without an offer, is to conclude that something is wrong with you. The profile, the age, the last role, the interview performance. The data point elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Senior searches take longer for reasons built into how the senior market works. The number of relevant positions is small, and most are never advertised; they move through networks, search mandates and internal successions at their own pace, which cannot be accelerated from outside. Decision cycles at senior level involve more stakeholders, more interviews, more references and increasingly assessments; a single process from first conversation to signed contract routinely stretches over three to four months. Companies have become more cautious: replacements move more slowly, and every senior appointment is scrutinised harder than three years ago. And as we described in our article on the flood of applications, the visible market has become dramatically more crowded, with up to 50 per cent more applications per job ad while the number of ads has fallen.<\/p>\n
None of these factors is about you. They are the operating conditions of the market you are searching in. An average of 7.3 months is not a series of personal rejections. It is the arithmetic of few positions, long processes and cautious buyers.<\/p>\n
A second level deserves mention. As we wrote in our Grass Brief on career breaks, rebuilding a stable professional identity after an involuntary exit typically takes 18 to 24 months. The outer search and the inner rebuilding run in parallel, and they are not the same process. Understanding that the 7.3 months are normal is what allows the deeper work to happen without panic corrupting it.<\/p>\n
Part of what makes the timeline bearable is understanding that it is not empty waiting. A well-run senior search has phases, and each phase does real work.<\/p>\n
The first weeks belong to positioning: processing what has happened, developing the transition narrative, setting a clear direction instead of being “open to anything”. Executives who skip this phase and start applying in week one usually spend months later repairing the damage of a blurred first impression.<\/p>\n
The middle months belong to the market: activating the Right 100, holding conversations that are not interviews but create the attention from which interviews eventually arise, entering the first real processes. This is also where invisible progress accumulates, the mentions in rooms you are not sitting in, the headhunter who files your profile for a mandate that arrives in October.<\/p>\n
And then there is the phase that tests everyone: the stretch in which processes are running but nothing closes. Second rounds, references, delays, a position frozen at the last minute. This is where the 7.3-month average is actually earned, and it is exactly here that the two most expensive mistakes happen.<\/p>\n
We see the same two failure patterns in this phase, and they are mirror images of each other.<\/p>\n
The first is the panic acceptance. The uncertainty becomes unbearable, an offer appears, and the executive accepts it, not because it fits but because it ends the search. We have written before about what the research says: well-being recovers with re-employment, but the extent of the recovery depends on the quality of the role, and a poorly fitting acceptance often produces the next short tenure, the next explanation, the next search. Measured against an average of 7.3 months, accepting the wrong role in month five to avoid two more months of searching is a catastrophically bad trade.<\/p>\n
The second is the quiet withdrawal. Rejections pile up, the executive concludes that the market has spoken, activity drops, the network cools, and the search silently stretches from months into a year. The data on long searches are clear: the risk is not the timeline itself but the disengagement it can trigger, especially in the over-50 group, where prolonged unemployment measurably increases the risk of leaving the labour market prematurely and permanently.<\/p>\n
Both patterns share a root: the person was never told what a normal timeline looks like, so a normal timeline felt like failure.<\/p>\n
That is why we put the 7.3 months on the table at the very start of every mandate, together with their practical consequences.<\/p>\n
Financially, it means budgeting the transition realistically from day one, so that money pressure does not start making career decisions from month six onwards. If severance and reserves are planned around a four-month assumption, the panic arrives on schedule.<\/p>\n
For the family, it means setting expectations early, a topic we covered in our article on the partner factor. A partner who knows that seven to nine months are normal interprets month five completely differently from a partner who was told “a few months”.<\/p>\n
For the search itself, it means building a rhythm that is sustainable over three quarters, not a sprint that burns out by Easter. The transition architecture we described in our resilience article, fixed blocks for market work, networking and real recovery, exists precisely because the realistic timeline demands endurance, not intensity.<\/p>\n
And strategically, it means measuring progress by the right indicators. In a 7.3-month search, “no signed contract yet” is meaningless information in the first two quarters. The number of real market conversations per month, the warmth of the Right 100, the quality of the processes you are in, the clarity of the feedback on your positioning: these measures move long before the contract, and they predict it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The number does something else, and it is perhaps the most valuable thing of all. It removes the false comparison.<\/p>\n
The executive who measures their position in month five against an imagined “normal” of three months is failing. The same executive, measured against the actual Swiss average, is on track, in the middle of a process that, according to the data, is unfolding exactly as these processes unfold, in this market, for this age group, at this level.<\/p>\n
The same facts. A completely different psychology. And as we have seen across hundreds of transitions, psychology drives behaviour: the executive who is on track keeps making good decisions, keeps showing up to conversations with composure and keeps saying no to unsuitable offers. The “failing” executive starts making exactly the mistakes that turn 7.3 months into fourteen.<\/p>\n
The market sets the timeline. You decide what happens within it.<\/p>\n
At Grass & Partner, we accompany executives and senior managers through career transitions, with a particular focus on making experience visible, relevant and valued. Grass & Partner is a member of the focus50plus network, which is committed to integrating and retaining experienced workers in the Swiss labour market. If you or someone in your network is going through a career change, we are here for you. Contact us at https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/our-services\/new-placement\/<\/a><\/p>\n Sources: Labour market barometer 2026 (industry barometer of the Swiss outplacement sector: average search duration of 7.3 months for jobseekers aged 50plus; 41 per cent of dismissals affect people over 50; search duration for university graduates 3.2 months); SECO, “Die Lage auf dem Arbeitsmarkt”, 2026 (registered jobseekers above 230’000; unemployment around 10 per cent above the previous year); JobCloud, Q2 2026 labour market update (up to 50 per cent more applications per job ad); What Works Centre for Wellbeing, re-employment and role quality; Minds Open Consulting, time horizon of identity reconstruction; BFS \/ SECO, employment histories from age 50 in Switzerland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is a conversation we have in almost every coaching mandate, usually somewhere between month three and month five. The client sits down, visibly heavier than in the early sessions, and says a version of the same sentence: “I thought I’d have something by now.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":8441,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","rank_math_title":"","rank_math_description":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-monday-brief"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8450\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}