Director of Corporate Development - Private Women's Healthcare
We had a fantastic time partnering a privately-owned private healthcare business located in London. Established for around 13 years, this business provided women’s health services and had gained a very strong reputation for quality of care.
The business had grown organically through word of mouth and patient recommendations and the shareholders gained an appetite to invest in its brand and embark on an ambitious growth strategy that could see it become a national operation.
The business had a strong management team to manage the business day to day but the strategic decisions were passed to 3 key shareholders who all had full-time jobs elsewhere. This slowed decision making and the potential pace of growth of the business. The shareholders, therefore, decided to create a new role which started out as a Centre Director and ended up being a Director of Corporate Development (as it was focused on driving profitable growth and not just maintaining the status quo).
The Role
Reporting to the CEO, the Corporate Development Director role was created to lead, coach and mentor the existing team of c. 20 whilst developing plans to deliver ambitious profitable growth. The business had focused on women’s health services but was interested in exploring how it could broaden its service offering and what new channels to market it could build. The role was given a blank piece of paper and a blue-sky approach to take the business forward.
The Solution
We invested time with the CEO to get under the skin of the business, really understand its culture, its nuances and its vision and values. We used our 20 plus years’ experience in healthcare to help our client shape the role and identify what was and was not possible in respect of the candidates they could attract for the remuneration package on offer. The role was based in London which was a hot bed of growing private healthcare companies and high calibre candidates were in short supply.
We advised the client that candidates would not be queuing up to work for them and that we needed to develop a recruitment strategy that would be both focused whilst also casting the net wide.
Our agreed process combined a proactive headhunting exercise focused on researching and engaging with candidates who had launched new services and combined a strong commercial and operations background with designing a creative social media campaign to cast the net wide, online advertising in specific and relevant media and networking our significant network of individuals in the healthcare industry.
Through regular communications with our client to discuss candidate profiles we ended up with a strong longlist of 5 who we then took through a robust assessment process. 4 candidates were shortlisted for the client to meet and they took them through a two stage interview and presentation process.
The Result
We successfully appointed a new Director of Corporate Development first time and with little compromise against our agreed job specification and target remuneration package.
About the author
Having started his career in Executive Search in 1998, Doug set up Collingwood in 2005 alongside his wife, Claire Mackay.
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