North American Client Seeks Turnaround Utility Leader

The Challenge

Find a unique leader with depth in resources and a focus in utilities for their global turnaround practice. A leading turnaround and transformation consulting firm retained Magellan to find the right individual to build and grow a new turnaround practice focused in resources.

The Approach

Develop a culturally unique hiring case
Experience told us that turnaround and consulting professionals have different styles. To accurately represent the firm’s culture to candidates, we spent several days in our client’s offices speaking with pre-MBA through Managing Director level consultants to discuss their working styles as well as their goals, expectations, and concerns for the new hires.

Develop a compelling career case
The time spent with our client helped us to understand their unique culture and pinpoint a persuasive selling proposition that generated significant interest in the market. Our depth in resources search work at the partner level enabled us to reconfigure the target compensation structure to ensure it would be a draw, rather than a barrier, to considering the position.

Locate and secure the best candidates
As is our practice, the partner that sold the work led the team throughout the search. Using his extensive network in the resources, specifically in the utility space as well as the consulting arenas was combined with third party research and a thorough list of all possible active and passive candidates was created. From there, we moved quickly to coordinate interviews and narrow the field to the top candidates. Many of the initial discussions were done confidentially to keep the search under the radar in its initial stages due to the sensitivity of the projects involved.

The Magellan Difference

• Developed a unique career case which accentuated the career advantages of a combined consulting and turnaround role
• Narrowed the target candidate pool significantly prior to engaging the market to keep the search confidential and to make those candidates engaged understand how serious the role was
• Prework enabled Magellan to complete the search within 2 months

The Results

Prescreening created a streamlined and professional hiring process that attracted high quality talent
Magellan’s focus on reviewing potential candidates in depth with our client before active engagement made the hiring process go far more smoothly and left the candidates selected with a sense of being special in the process. In fact over 90% of the candidates we identified called us back to learn more about the role. Candidates with depth in the utility sector were impressed with the level of focus from our client’s hiring team and with their sense of mission.

Our efforts resulted in a short target list of viable candidates which were extensively vetted for skills and cultural fit. Additionally, given the imperative for being able to engage with clients immediately special care was given to accelerated onboarding and integration.

Client’s successful hire hits the ground running
We surpassed our client’s expectations by completing this search more quickly than expected and our client has been very pleased with the performance of the successful candidate. Not only was our candidate able to work to resolve a critical issue with a specific client, but because of the candidate’s broader level of resources knowledge was able to rise to co-leader of our client’s global resources practice.