IOM3

Chief Executive

The Business:

The Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3) is a leading UK engineering institution.

Formed in 2002 by a merger of the Institute of Materials and the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, IOM3 is a leading authority in the global mining and materials community.

IOM3 is a huge organisation, with over 18,000 members, representing scientific, technical, and human resources linking industry, government, and academia.

The Challenge:

IOM3 approached us with the need to recruit for a senior role within their business. As this role was important, they were looking to work with a headhunting agency in order to find the best candidates possible.

IOM3 chose to work with us for this role through our face to face meeting with their management team. In this meeting, we built a great relationship with the management team and demonstrated full transparency regarding our entire process. This impressed IOM3, leading them to select us as their executive search firm of choice. With confidence that we could find the right candidate for IOM3, we set out to really understand their wants and needs.

IOM3 were looking to recruit a new Chief Executive to join their business and assist them in going from strength to strength.

This role featured a wealth of responsibilities. One of the main responsibilities was providing leadership and strategic direction not only for the Institute’s development as a professional membership organisation, but also for resource coordination for income generation.

The role would require the successful candidate to act as the focus on interaction with technical communities, government, and industry organisations, influencing and evolving the UK strategy in the process.

The Chief Executive works with the Board Chairmen and President to deliver valuable activity to membership and provide public benefit. The role involved taking full responsibility for appointing and organising staff as well as other resources in order to deliver the objectives of the 5-year plan.

Our Candidate:

The ideal candidate for this role was a dynamic individual with the ability to inspire even more success and further raise awareness across all the business subsidiaries as well as build commercial success.

As the role was highly prestigious, candidates needed to be highly experienced in influencing and guiding Government policy, as well as have a strong, successful track record in financial management within a major business.

They would need to fully understand the operation of membership organisations, previously holding a senior management role within a relevant industry. Candidates were required to possess excellent people management skills and knowledge as well as interaction with government departments and trade bodies.

Our Solution:

For this executive search, our search process was very thorough. We targeted our efforts in line with our client’s needs, ensuring we found and presented only the most relevant candidates.

We focused on finding Managing Directors, CEOs, and business leaders residing in other professional membership institutes. We also searched for candidates within other related manufacturing and product or materials handling industries.

We understood that by focusing our efforts into searching in this manner we would be able to conduct a more thorough search, meaning no potential relevant candidate would go unnoticed.

Knowing the Client:

With every senior headhunt there are challenges. Chief Executive roles are notoriously hard to fill, as the very best candidates are held tightly by their current businesses. The top Chief Executives are more often than not very happy in their current roles, which means they need to be enticed towards new opportunities over a period of time. Luckily for this particular role, there was a large amount of interest, which ultimately presented a challenge in and of itself. The number of relevant candidates for the role was so high that we spent additional time screening and keeping our client updated on our progress. We maintained close communication with all parties throughout the process, including during the interview stages, to ensure that the interviews went smoothly with no clashing of diaries. As this role was the first CEO appointment for the organisation in 22 years, we worked very closely with the client to ensure best practices were upheld whilst ensuring both the client and candidates received an honest, fully transparent approach.

Identifying the Candidate:

As a result of this extensive headhunt, we produced a shortlist of 9 excellent candidates. This was a broad selection of talented individuals that reflected the sheer breadth of search that we carried out. We wanted to give our client confidence that there was a range of fields and background to choose from in our shortlisted candidates. IOM3 were very impressed with this shortlist, ultimately taking on one standout candidate as their new Chief Executive.

Simply Bringing the Right People Together:

This headhunt is yet another feather in our cap, further strengthening our reputation as a top headhunting firm. We conducted an extremely thorough talent search, encompassing all the key areas in which relevant CEOs could be found. We maintained constant contact with both our client and candidates, with full transparency and honesty throughout the process. As a result, we produced a broad shortlist of excellent candidates and provided IOM3 with their new Chief Executive, who was an excellent fit to lead the business into the future. This experience was very pleasing for all parties, and we look forward to working with IOM3 again to help them find the perfect candidate once again for any future opportunities.