Half the Market Is Moving, and Almost Nobody Feels Ready

LinkedIn's January 2026 research described a market moving in two directions at once. More than half of people globally, 52%, said they were looking for a new role, while nearly 80% said they felt unprepared to search for one. At the same time, two-thirds of recruiters reported that finding quality talent had become harder.

That combination is worth sitting with. It is not a shortage of candidates or a shortage of roles. It is a matching problem: a great deal of movement, very little of it well framed.

Senior leaders are not exempt. The people we speak to are usually excellent at their work and genuinely unprepared for the search itself, unclear on what they are targeting, uncertain how to approach a market discreetly while employed, and reluctant to start because the process feels exposing.

Preparation, in this context, is not motivation. It is a target list of organisations, a positioning document that survives a ninety-second read, and someone making the approaches so the search does not depend on your own visibility.

If two-thirds of recruiters say good people are hard to find while four in five candidates feel unready to be found, the advantage goes to whoever closes that gap deliberately.