The Client

Established for over 30 years, our client is a rapidly growing c. €100 million privately owned business recognised as a market leading innovator of surgical instruments and technology for the ophthalmology sector.

Unlike its global, “blue-chip” competition, the business has been founded on both a moral compass and a real focus on its people. It is a business with real personality, building strong partnering relationships with the world’s top surgeons to provide “best in class” care and solutions to their patients. 

The Business Challenge

As part of our ongoing partnership to appoint a range of senior-level industry professionals across commercial functions, Collingwood Executive Search were asked to recruit a newly created role for a Global Training Manager.

The role had an internal focus to innovate training for the sales, application sales and customer service teams globally. Run of the mill training was of no interest and the client wanted someone with experience of the latest training techniques and technology from the ophthalmic industry. 

The Role

Reporting to the CEO, the Global Training Manager was a newly created role and so the first challenge was to raise the profile and value of training in the company. The role was critical in the company’s ambitious growth plan and targeted on ensuring internal departments understood their product portfolio and the solutions they provided, whilst also delivering a fantastic customer experience.

The role had to be filled with someone who had delivered a similar challenge with a surgical instrument manufacturer in the global ophthalmic industry. The real challenge was to find someone who aligned with the client’s vision and values, was able to integrate to their “can do”, non-corporate, entrepreneurial culture with a limited budget whilst also having expertise in the therapy area.

The Solution

Collingwood’s medical devices practice invested a lot of time with our client’s Chairman and Chief Executive to really understand the company, the role and most importantly their culture. We developed an in-depth assignment specification providing detail around the company, its employer branding, the job specification, candidate profile including behaviours and core competencies and lastly a recommended remuneration package aimed at enticing an extremely high calibre appointment.

We delivered a proactive headhunting solution which required us utilising our strong network in the ophthalmic industry. As the industry is so “tight-knit” we provided our client with weekly market insights to ensure we engaged with candidates of interest to them and avoided stepping on toes.

We arrived at a candidate long list consisting of 6 individuals from the client’s sector.

We consulted with our client to discuss each individual in detail before agreeing on a select long list that we then met face to face to present our client, details on the role and to conduct an in-depth competency and behaviourally based interview.

After an in-depth assessment, Collingwood presented a shortlist of 4 candidates.

The client interviewed these 4 fully qualified candidates and in preparation were presented with detailed interview notes, 3^rd party psychometric assessments and our expert opinion based on our 15 years delivering senior roles for medical devices organisations. 

The Result

The client was delighted with the candidate shortlist, progressed 2 to a final interview and successfully appointed a very high calibre individual from a key competitor.

The appointed individual was viewed a “high potential” and has since progressed upwards within the organisation.