You’ve identified some key obstacles, what are your solutions?

Since the old rules don’t work, executives have to approach their search like a campaign. Many out-of-work executives are also dealing with outside pressures, like getting behind on their home payments—or possibly even facing losing their homes, having problems with their families, suffering from low self-esteem. Because when you lose your job, it affects many other aspects of your life.

So they need to realize that, for the most part, their view of themselves is over-inflated because so many people, executives or otherwise, equate their sense of self-worth with their careers. Once they can gain objectivity, often by going to someone else, they need to formulate a game plan across multiple channels of marketing. They need to look at their job search like a business project. When they make that switch in their heads, the process can often become easier to handle.

And traditional rules for résumés being one page, in chronological order, on a specific type of paper are not going to make a dent. Your résumé can be written on a regular sheet of paper with crayon. If you have the right skills, you’ll get hired.

You say that going to HR professionals, recruiters, or hiring managers is the last thing jobseekers should do. Why is that?

The recruiting market is down an average of 60 to 70 percent, with pockets around the nation where that figure’s even worse. That means that recruiters don’t have the job orders. So, in turn, they’ve become more picky, as have hiring managers and other HR professionals.

Because there’s such an oversupply of jobseekers to every demand, many recruiters, HR teams, and hiring managers are looking for that Ivy League education, that MBA, the traditional climb up the ladder, and a proven track record of success during a recession. And that rules out a lot of candidates right off the bat.

The other issue executives are running into is that recruiters who might have helped them in the past—and I say helped versus "worked for them," because recruiters work for companies, not jobseekers—simply don’t have the jobs to fill like they used to.

If candidates are missing the formal education companies are looking for, is this the time to go back to school?

Getting an advanced degree is never going to get you the job. It may open a lot of doors, but it isn’t the ultimate reason clients land work.

So where do you and your firm come in? What can a client expect?

We always start with a career marketability assessment because we can’t help everyone. A critical part of the assessment is gauging if the perspective client’s head is in the game. Because if they don’t have that fighting spirit, there’s not much we can do for them. They have to want to fight for it.

If we determine that a client has marketability potential, we assemble a team that does industry profiling, research for where that person’s skill set can be leveraged, decide which marketing channels will work for the candidate, and then we go back in to add the creative material.

We also offer coaching to help candidates emotionally prepare for the search and proceed with a strategy session that then leads to the launch of their campaign.

Once we’ve set a course of action, we typically meet on a weekly basis, do interview prep and debriefings, and go from there.

What’s your success rate?

We’ve placed over 90 percent of our candidates with the typical search lasting just under four months.

Can you share a success story with us?

I had a client in the Northeast who lost out on a job seven times, and this is a $400,000 executive. Well, after she was a finalist on the seventh job and still didn’t get it, she emailed me. We prepped her and she got the next job she was up for.

The average woman contacts me after she’s been out of work for about five to eight months. The average candidate has been a finalist five times and hasn’t gotten the offer.

I always tell them that someone’s going to get the job. It might as well be you.

Any last piece of advice?

The best way I can think of to sum up is this: We used to believe that if you build a better mousetrap, the mice would come. Today, you have to prove that you are the best mousetrap—and then you have to go to where the mice are. Practice your one-minute commercial and keep in mind that your pitch should be different [depending on] whether you’re talking in front of the board of directors, the CEO, the CFO, and others.

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Romy Ribitzky is an associate editor at Portfolio.com.