Career Coach Reveals: Why Passion Isn't Enough for Job Seekers Over 40 (And What to Focus On Instead)

Executive career coach Loren Greiff shares her counterintuitive advice for experienced professionals struggling to land their next role.

Loren Greiff, an executive career coach, shares her advice for job seekers over 40.

For older job seekers, the biggest risk isn't rejection—it's the silence from hiring managers that can turn a career dry spell into long-term unemployment. Greiff sees this happen regularly in her work with executives over 40.

"Smart, credentialed leaders get stuck because they're running on an outdated operating system," Greiff explains. While younger workers are often hired for potential, older executives face a different reality: "Older workers are evaluated through a lens of cost, immediacy, and risk."

The Problem with Leading with Passion

When passion leads the narrative, "employers often translate it into 'unfocused,' 'expensive,' or 'overqualified,'" Greiff says. That's why she doesn't tell older executives to abandon passion—she advises them to sequence it differently. Passion should become a byproduct, not the pitch.

"Those who lead with passion first don't usually get rejected outright; they get stalled," she warns. "And that's how well-intentioned 'I've earned this' thinking quietly turns into long-term unemployment."

The 3 C's Framework: Culture, Compensation, Challenge

To rewire experienced candidates to become more hireable, Greiff first asks them to think about their next role and rank their '3 C's'—culture, compensation, and challenge—in terms of priority.

Why the 3 C's Matter So Much to Older Workers

When younger workers lack clarity on their 3 C's, the penalty is usually inefficiency. "They can more readily take an immediate wrong role and quickly move again," Greiff explains. "A wrong move early in a career is a detour."

But for older job seekers, the consequences can be far more dire. "Employers tend to have less tolerance for experimentation with senior hires, and later in your career, there's simply less runway to recover from a misstep."

That's why having clarity about your desired career trajectory via the 3 C's isn't just a preference for older workers—it's a risk-management tool.

The 'C' You Choose as Your Top Priority is Your Non-Negotiable

If your primary concern is about a new challenge, Greiff pushes her clients to ask themselves specific questions:

• Is the challenge you seek a need for intellectual stimulation?
• Do you want to move into a more innovative area?
• Do you want to embrace a different area of technology?
• Do you want to manage a larger budget?

For candidates who value culture as their top "C," Greiff recommends zeroing in on exactly what they want—such as working in a mission-based organization or an environment where they're empowered to make mistakes—rather than setting overly general goals.

Or perhaps compensation is your most important "C"—as may be the case for executives who took time out of the workforce to raise children, care for aging parents, or take a sabbatical.

"It leads to a very different strategy," Greiff notes. "If compensation is your number one, you're OK with traveling every week, you're OK with burning the midnight oil."

This simple exercise helps older job hunters by alleviating pressure, uncovering trade-offs, and turning uncertainty into a reliable GPS.

Offer Solutions to Problems Employers Have

Once your priorities have been set, you need to change gears. Instead of making your job search just about your own needs, Greiff recommends that job seekers think about what problem they can solve for prospective employers.

The key is balancing finding work you're passionate about (according to your 3 C's assessment) while being strategic about how to sell your value.

This is particularly important in a climate of uncertainty. Telling a hiring manager, "What really moves me is the following…" isn't nearly as impactful as people think. "To employers, this isn't kumbaya," Greiff says. "This is serious, and they're looking, in a period of uncertainty, to mitigate as many areas that point to risk as they possibly can."

Hiring managers want to know who will solve their most urgent, expensive problems. "These problems have an uncanny ability to get fast-tracked—and if you're offering something that isn't urgent on the side of the decision-maker, your search will lag."

Greiff pushes all her clients over 40 to answer one practical question: What urgent, expensive problem do you have the unfair edge to solve?—and coaches them to incorporate their answer into all their networking, interviews, job-search materials, and thought leadership.

"Once you can articulate that, compensation stops looking like a cost and starts looking like ROI," she explains. "Suddenly, 'too experienced' turns into 'exactly the edge we need.'"

The Bottom Line

The bottom line, Greiff says, is that people who reframe their job search around an employer's pain get hired, while those who don't are in danger of slipping into long-term unemployment.

"When older job seekers target urgent, expensive problems, passion follows," she concludes. "Companies don't want dream-chasers; they want leaders who crush costly pain points."