Executive career coaching for Silicon Valley

What makes Silicon Valley different from the rest of the country?

Large technology employers hire against formal leveling systems rather than job titles, and that single fact changes the entire search. Your title is close to meaningless in the process. What matters is the level you map to, and the level you map to decides your compensation band, your scope and whether you are even routed to the right interview loop.

Executives who ignore this get down-leveled on the way in, sometimes by a full step, and spend the next two years climbing back to where they already were.

How do you avoid getting down-leveled?

By making scope legible before anyone calibrates you. Down-leveling usually happens because the resume describes responsibilities rather than the size of what was owned: headcount, budget, surface area, blast radius of a decision, how many levels reported through you.

The positioning work makes that explicit and consistent everywhere a reviewer looks, which is the resume, the LinkedIn profile, the recruiter screen and the hiring committee packet.

• Organization size and how many management layers reported to you
• Budget owned and the decisions you made unilaterally
• Scope of the surface you were accountable for
• Cross-functional influence without direct authority
• The outcomes that changed while you owned it

How does the hiring committee process change interview preparation?

Large technology employers frequently decide by committee, using written feedback from interviewers who never meet you a second time. That means your interviewers are writing evidence, not forming impressions.

Preparation shifts accordingly. Answers need to be structured so that an interviewer taking notes captures the specific signal the committee is looking for. Charm does not survive the transcription; structure does.

When should equity timing decide your move?

More often than people admit. Refresh grants, cliff dates and the shape of a four-year vest mean the difference between leaving in March and leaving in September can be substantial.

That is a planning question, not a negotiation question, and it belongs at the start of a campaign rather than at the offer. The campaign is built backwards from the date that actually makes sense for you.

Who does Linda work with on the Peninsula and in the South Bay?

Engineering, product, data and infrastructure leadership at large technology employers, plus executives moving between big technology and the venture-backed companies around it.

The practice also sees a steady flow of senior leaders in the affluent Peninsula communities, meaning Palo Alto, Los Altos, Atherton, Menlo Park and Saratoga, who are running quiet searches while still in seat.

Does an internal move need the same work as an external one?

Usually more. Internal candidates are judged against a record that already exists, including calibration history and the opinions of people who have watched you for years.

The work is repositioning inside a known context: making a case for scope you have not formally held, and getting the right people to say the right sentence about you in a calibration room you will never sit in.

Linda Van Valkenburgh holds five career-coaching certifications (MS, CCMC, CJSS, CSMCS, CELDC), is an invited Executive Career Coach Expert for the CEO Trust community of chief executives, and works with senior leaders across the United States. Every engagement starts the same way: a free assessment, then a complimentary thirty-minute consultation. See packages, the C-suite coaching page, or an honest answer on whether a coach is worth it.