Building New Boards - How Moon Consulting Recruits Executive Teams

It is a sophisticated task to source the right new senior director for a company, but the difficulty increases many fold when a client needs to find multiple executives for the same board. Vanessa Moon of Moon Consulting has been involved in 3 high profile team builds for major clients in the UK in the past 18 months, two in the South West and one in London.

In all of these cases, Vanessa was tasked with hiring a number of senior Directors over a strict time frame, which was made more challenging by the need to keep the campaigns confidential and the need to use a wide variety of recruiting techniques.
She needed to have detailed knowledge of the client, their business plans, values and goals – information way beyond that required for an individual vacancy. This was to ensure that each of the new individuals would not only gel well into the existing board, but with the rest of the new recruits too.

Each case required a carefully considered bespoke approach.

   
•    The first case was a Global Services Business undergoing explosive growth due to winning a series of global contracts. They required a Finance Director, Sales Director and IT Services Director. Vanessa sourced all the new Directors from blue chip backgrounds as they would have the experience of directing a large company into new markets. She also used psychometric testing to ensure personality fit and required the candidates to make satisfactory presentations to the holding company board.

•    The second case was a Niche Manufacturer with an international blue chip client base that required a Technical Director, and R&D Director. The company was tightly knit and the existing Board had worked together for a long time. It was therefore crucial to find compatible personalities and values to make sure that the new recruits integrated. Vanessa head-hunted candidates for the roles as she believed that advertising would return too many inappropriate applicants. She also conducted multiple rounds of interviews to ensure a personality fit and to test candidate knowledge of the company.

•    The third case was a high profile Media Group experiencing rapid growth after securing Private Equity backing. They required a Finance Director, Heads of Sales and a Managing Director. The investor was clear that any new recruits must understand the global growth potential and the direction of the business. Recruiting individuals who not only appreciated the business plan but were able to create market impact was vital to success.

Vanessa says: “in each campaign it was important to understand all the drivers of the business and meet all decision makers. I feel very privileged to be given the opportunity and trust from a client to build a team. When I am working on such assignments, I often have access to highly confidential and market sensitive information and the client and I agree up front how much of this we divulge to our short list. We are always keen to understand what research each candidate has done: how well do they know the client company and what they see as the main drivers for the clients business? We always factor this into the interview questions.”