The brief: a world-class CFO for a £1.9 billion turnover global engineering and built environment advisory business with 90 offices in 35 countries
Our client, with which we have partnered on a number of Executive Director and board appointments, is a globally renowned multi-disciplinary professional services organisation providing engineering, design, planning, project management and consulting services for all aspects of the built environment.
Our brief was to conduct an international search for a new Group Finance Director to play a key leadership role in the business, and collaborate with colleagues and the board on the development and implementation of future business strategy.
With its distinctive inclusive and collaborative culture, our client emphasised the importance of screening for values alignment and interpersonal style, as much as technical, strategic and commercial acumen.
Diverse commercial candidate pool and successful appointment
Our unique approach to the search – whereby a dedicated researcher focused on this project only for around 2 weeks – enabled our consultants to have multiple, detailed and engaging conversations with top CFOs in order to brief them fully about the opportunity and understand their approach and potential suitability for this brief. This approach resulted in a diverse and high-quality candidate pool drawn from professional services businesses as well as travel, media, real estate, FMCG, utilities as well as other industries.
- 18 candidates were presented for consideration, 5 of whom were women
- 6 candidates were interviewed, 3 of whom were women
The appointed candidate had a background which included being CFO of an international strategic advisory business, and in a silver circle law firm. At the time of writing, the candidate has now been in post with our client for over 3 years.