Private Equity Executive Search
Search for Senior VP for Top Tier Private Equity Brand.
Accelerating change – our client’s business challenge and setting
Our client is one of the world’s top private equity firms with approximately $150 billion of assets under management and a value-added investment approach, by partnering with management teams to help and grow great companies.
To strengthen their operating team further - a group of operational business executives that support portfolio company founders, Chief Executive Officers, and their management teams to improve their businesses – our client needed to appoint two high calibre executives to support pivotal transformation agendas.
Due to the fund’s multi-geo and varied sector investment thesis, it was important that the incoming executives were bi or tri-lingual, with diverse multinational leadership experiences in mid-to-large-cap enterprises, coupled with outstanding influencing skills to impact board initiatives.
Our approach and response to this challenge
After aligning on the prerequisite skills and experience required for the hires, we began an extensive market mapping exercise to identify over 500 executives across Europe, incorporating top performers from both consulting and relevant industries, before filtering and prioritising the most impressive and well-aligned executives.
Working in mini sprints we broke down the research into priority categories based on the fund’s portfolio needs. We then delivered two concurrent shortlists under the 5-week deadline, successfully placing the two mandated searches with two additional roles being created inside other portfolio companies to capture exceptionally strong backup candidates.
After the project wrap-up session with the fund, we proposed harnessing the pipeline of promising diverse talent captured in the original research and have subsequently created an ongoing programme whereby we engage high-potential executives in a longer-term dialogue about their fund and opportunities.
This future-minded ‘living shortlist’ has helped us build brand affinity in a highly-sought-after talent pool, using multiple creative touchpoints outside of traditional “interview mode” to position our client as the #1 private equity brand.
Accelerating results for our client
In the first 12 months of the programme, we’ve seen a significant increase in engagement from a notoriously hard-to-reach group of executives and secured multiple diverse hires to enhance the fund’s positioning.
