Do not evaluate the role. Evaluate the platform.
Two roles can carry an identical title, an identical salary band and an almost identical job description - and be completely different opportunities. The title tells you what you'd be called. It tells you almost nothing about whether the move is actually good.
In every senior conversation we run, the candidates who make the best decisions are the ones who stop comparing job descriptions and start diligencing the platform underneath the title. Who owns the business. How much capital is genuinely committed versus aspirational. Whether the company builds, buys, owns or sells its projects. None of that shows up in a job spec, and all of it determines whether the role you're being offered can become what it's being described as.
This matters more in renewable energy and infrastructure than in most sectors, because the gap between a well-capitalised platform executing at pace and a similarly-titled business running on thin pipeline and uncertain funding is enormous - and almost invisible from the outside until you know what to ask.
The questions the job spec won't answer
Before you take a call seriously, you want a clear answer to: what has actually been funded, versus what is only pipeline. What the company's real strategy is - development, acquisition, ownership, or some combination - and whether that matches what you'd be good at. Who you report to, and what authority the role genuinely carries versus what it appears to carry on an org chart. Where the previous person went, when that's knowable, and why. What needs to be true in the business twelve to twenty-four months from now for the hire to be judged a success.
"The title tells you what you'd be called. It tells you almost nothing about whether the move is good."
Equity and LTIP deserve the same scrutiny you'd give a salary number, not less. A meaningful-sounding equity allocation in a business with no realistic path to a liquidity event is worth having the conversation about, honestly, before you sign - not discovering the answer three years in. Ask how the last grant performed, what triggers a realisation event, and whether anyone at the company can point to a prior example of it actually paying out.
What this means in practice
Treat the first two or three conversations as your diligence process, not just theirs. A company that answers these questions directly and specifically is telling you something useful about how it operates. A company that deflects, or answers only in general terms, is telling you something too. Senior professionals who build this into how they evaluate every opportunity consistently make better moves - not because they get lucky, but because they stop being surprised six months in.
The role is the visible part of the decision. The platform behind it is what actually determines whether the next few years of your career go the way you're hoping.
