For senior hires, where expertise, client trust, and leadership complexity are involved, the true cost, when productivity loss, management time, and team disruption are factored in, can reach multiples of annual salary. Yet most organisations never carry out that fuller calculation. They measure what is easy to measure and overlook the rest.

Most outplacement support focuses on the tools of job searching while ignoring the person who has to use them. Paula Donnan Advisory takes a different approach: one that starts with strengths, ends with clarity, and includes follow-up contact for up to three months after the formal programme ends. Because the transition does not finish when the contract does.

By mid-career, most professionals are not short of self-awareness. What they are short of is clarity, specifically the kind of clarity that comes from having someone look at the whole picture with them and help bring order to what can feel like an overwhelming amount of noise. That is my job, and it is one I take seriously.