Case Study of a Difficult or Challenging Vacancy

The client is a top 20 firm that have recently gone through a period of transistion and considerable growth during the past twelve months.  This has been received by the market in both a positive and negative light, because of the assertiveness in their approach, making them a challenging company to promote.  

The client will only work on a contingency basis, even for their Partnership level recruitment. They needed a Tax Partner to join their Swindon office to have responsibility for a very specialist and highly technical role. Swindon is an inherently difficult market to recruit senior level people due to the demographics of the area. The client had already placed the role with a number of agencies, with the vacancy at live status for over six months, before Definitive decided to work on it. The candidates previously interviewed to date all requested business development opportunities within the role and unfortunately this position had none.

We would normally only work at partnership level on a retained basis, but because of the type of role and the exposure and credibility we would gain in the market from successufully fulfilling such a specific requirement, we decided to agree to work the role on a contingency basis. We had to be very specific about how the role was sold to potential candidates, due to the length of time the position had been on the market and the breadth of agencies who had already tried to fill the role. We identified the relevant candidates in the market, measuring the comparisons between the firms to ensure that the people we targeted were the right individuals, with the required background and would be interested in the opportunity.  

We knew it was important to be very specific on which candidates we would approach, following the role's previous positioning in the market. It was important to take a detailed brief from the client to ensure that we had a full list of the individuals they had already approached for the position to avoid duplication. The brief would also give us an extensive overview of the short, medium and long term plans for the firm and for this individual. Armed with this information, we were able to highlight our shortlist of candidates to target.

Within two weeks we had spoken to over 90% of the people on our shortlist and had highlighted an individual, from a client relationship spanning three years, who had decided they were looking for a new opportunity. We met with the candidate on an informal basis, at her request, to consult with her on her career options in the current market and give an overview of the particular client and role we were recruiting for. She decided to meet with the client offsite to maintain her confidentiality and after two further informal discussions, we arranged for her to meet with four of the Partners at the Definitive Consulting offices.  Once this meeting had taken place the candidate was offered the position and accepted.