Confidential

Global Account Director - Fintech Headhunters

The Business:

Our client is one of the fastest growing FinTech businesses in the payments space, with offices in the UK, Europe, and the US. Having been acquired recently and with ambitious new products and growth plans, they needed to make several senior appointments, including a new experienced Global Account Director.

Having worked with this client for a number of years and successfully appointing several candidates within key positions, the client knew we had a very strong understanding of their vitally important culture fit elements of their business. In addition, our wealth of experience and near unparalleled access to the FinTech and Payments spaces, provided our client with the confidence we would find the best person for the role.


The Challenge:

This is an extremely competitive field with a number of hugely successful, high profile competitors. Finding someone for this role meant targeting passive candidates not active ones, as the very best really don’t need to move regularly; they are well looked after by their current employers.

However, our research-led approach lends itself perfectly to undertaking a meticulous process to find those passive individuals (who usually make up over 80% of the candidates for nearly every search we complete).

Our Solution:

For this role it was crucial that the right person had industry experience, and a proven track record of managing clients in the space. It was also vital that they could work at pace in a dynamic and fast changing environment.

We targeted other payments businesses and FinTech more broadly. We made sure to target businesses that were on or had already completed a similar growth path so as to ensure that someone could come in and hit the ground running.

We also prioritised people who were used to working autonomously and with remote teams and clients, as this was a big part of the role.

Identifying the Candidate:

From an initial target list of 55 candidates, we refined this to a long list of 10, and then a shortlist of 3 excellent individuals that the client interviewed, including the ultimately successful candidate. We were able to introduce them to someone who had previously worked at a competitor, and most recently worked at a start-up.

Simply Bringing the Right People Together:

The successful candidate had the right mix of experience for them. Even more importantly. she was the exact right person and culture fit; our behavioural and psychometric profiling (that we conduct as standard for all searches) showed her to be an incredibly strong match for the existing management team. She even had the language skills that they had listed as a ‘desirable’ element in the brief - she had worked in several countries and spoke multiple languages.