CLIENT: Global Strategy Consulting Firm

EXECUTIVES: Practice Leadership


BUSINESS UNIT: Assessment Practice

Executive Search Recruiting Challenge: Strategy Consulting Assessment Director

The Situation

As a firm, everyone at Rice Cohen continued to hear great things about a global firm specializing in Strategy Consulting. They were growing their core business and it seemed even their newest practices were getting noticed globally. We had not worked with them as a client but, when working on a CEO search for another client, tried to recruit their CEO. The individual wasn’t interested but the conversation continued. The client had been working with a different search firm and wasn’t getting the results they wanted so brought us in on a critical hiring need for a Strategy Consulting Assessment Director position they had spent months struggling to fill. Knowing that our consultants have such strong expertise in the human capital and talent management area, as well as our vast network of top talent in the space, we felt confident we could quickly help.

Solution Implemented

We partnered with our client to find out exactly what they were looking for and what had been missing in the candidates they had interviewed to date. We learned that this individual needed to have a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology and significant experience working with custom executive assessments in a consulting environment. Seeing as this search had been ongoing for a number of months before we got involved there were a large number of candidates that they had already screened out. After our consultants partnered with our client we devised a unique Search Assignment Profile, and Targeted Company list and were sure to exclude any candidates they had already spoken with.

The Search Results

Our client was concerned that they may need to relocate someone to be their new Strategy Consulting Assessment Director but had a strong preference to find someone already living in the region. However, our consultants proactively reached out to over 160 qualified Ph.D. Industrial/Organizational Psychologists that had the necessary assessment center experience. Out of these we presented the 12 most qualified to our client. While many were not the right fit, one of the individuals we presented was a great fit for the firm culturally, had the correct educational background and work experience, and he lived in the desired region, an offer was presented and quickly accepted and their candidate of choice was able to quickly make a positive impact with our client as the new Strategy Consulting Assessment Director.