Consulting & Professional Services – Management consulting

Challenge

Our client, a European based management consultancy, wanted to double the size of their business over three years. To do this they needed to bring in senior hires to help support their large graduate intake and to manage and lead client engagements. Historically, they had found it challenging to find very high-quality candidates who were the right cultural fit.

The client specifically wanted high performers with a strong academic background, an excellent career trajectory, a proven ability to develop long-term client relationships, excellent numerical/analytical ability and a combination of tenacity, intellectual curiosity and humility. These ‘superstars’ were not active in the market which meant engaging with them would require a focused approach with a long-term horizon.

Solution

Sheffield Haworth designed a short and long-term talent pipeline programme to scope out the market for potential talent. The intention was to make eight senior hires in year one, with increasing numbers planned for years two and three. SH employed an intensive data-led approach to the research phase, mapping talent within specific target organisations.

Bespoke dashboards were designed to provide the client with insights into the talent universe with a weekly report presented to the leadership team. SH also created a structured and consistent approach methodology which gave Newton the optimum potential for engagement with candidates, focusing on key approach times and messaging to enable success.

Outcome

Halfway through year one of the programme and SH has developed an excellent pipeline of talent, both in the short and longer term. Our team is on target to over-achieve on the planned number of hires and the client’s business plans have been tweaked to consider the talent available. They have also been able to use the data from the search to support and inform their growth plans, which were previously based on market opportunity rather than talent.

SH has worked closely with the Board, recruitment team and HR to help advise around all talent issues. It is expected that Newton will be well placed for years two and three of the programme as a result of the insights gained from the search thus far.

Challenge

Sheffield Haworth are currently partnering with this client as part of the firm’s significant investment to build their global Strategy practice globally.

In order to support the delivery of the firm’s ambitions to be able to support clients from strategy through to execution it was critical to be able to attract senior, Partner level, talent from Tier 1 Management Consulting / Strategy firms.

Sheffield Haworth were ultimately selected as a key executive search partner to build out these new capabilities given our strong track record of being able to identify and engage talent from traditional and non-traditional sources.

These are global searches with focus on specific competency or sector focus areas.

Solution

10 Partner level hires across a variety of sectors and competencies, as a result the strategy practice is now one of the fastest growing and most significant revenue contributors for the business in the region.

Our team has supported this client  for over 20 years and in the last 5 years appointed c.100 Partner, Associate Partner & Director hires globally predominantly within Strategy, Consulting & Technology.

Sheffield Haworth has also delivered Diversity, Team Lift and Company Acquisition programmes

Sample of completed Searches

• Partner, Strategy, Industrials
• Partner, Strategy and Digital Operations
• Partner, Strategy, Financial Services
• Partner, Strategy, Regional Health & Life Sciences lead
• Partner, Strategy, Regional Consumer Goods lead
• Partner, Strategy, Consumer Goods
• Partner, Strategy and Turnaround, Consumer Goods
• Partner, Strategy, Restructuring & Turnaround, Industrial Goods
• Partner, Strategy, Country Lead
• Partner, Strategy, Digital

Challenge

Our client is a global multi-disciplinary professional services firm with an established and successful technology and analytics practices. We were engaged to help address the lack of gender diverse Partners within the analytics and technology businesses, with a particular focus those with experience working in the Financial Services sector.

It was important that the successful individuals could also bring experience of driving revenue growth across large key accounts, and selling multi discipline projects across technology.

Solution

We agreed from the outset that it would be important to engage with overseas talent due to the relatively small gender diverse talent pool within the local market.

We built 2 separate market maps in order to help our client visualise the different talent pools – the local market technology and analytics consulting and corporate technology and analytics market, and an international map of gender diverse  consulting profiles.

We were particularly conscious of how the roles were positioned due to the lack of diversity within the existing leadership team and advised our client specifically around this and the interview process. We felt it was important to include female Partners from other areas of the business in order to help satisfy candidates questions around their diversity agenda.

Outcome

Through this search SH identified Partner candidates in the local market and globally, assessing them and bringing them into process and have successfully hired four individuals to date which has significantly shifted the diversity of the leadership team in the local market.

Data on search:

• Candidates identified: 387
• Candidates brought into active pipeline and assessed by client: 17
• Candidates hired so far: 4 (3 from the local market and 1 relocating)

As part of this we also built a pipeline of diverse technology and analytics talent for future hires.