Marketing Director
Executive Search success story: Ben Corlett, Amber River
Introduction to Amber River
Amber River is a group of like-minded, values-driven people with a passion for financial planning. The business thinks about financial planning in a way that goes beyond financial advice. They call it Life Landscaping® and is made up of a group of like-minded, values-driven people with a passion for independent financial planning.
The team at Amber River work together with one, single-minded purpose: To enrich the lives of the people they meet. Through conversations and knowledge sharing, financial planning and advice, whatever life stage you’re at, the team at Amber River help you plan for a life well-lived.
What was your recruitment challenge?
Amber River is a fast-growing business, and with growth came the challenge and opportunity to develop a new brand in the financial services sector.
To do this, we needed new expertise within the business – someone who had a background within the early stages of brand development and proven results in increasing brand awareness measures.
As part of the brand development work, we needed someone to understand and drive our point of difference in the market, called ‘Life Landscaping®’, and carefully bring this concept to life through brand creative, messaging, and customer experience.
A big part of the recruitment challenge was to find a candidate who possessed the right personal characteristics, as well as the required practical experience within brand creation. Our hub businesses would also be adopting this new brand, so the candidate needed to be able to partner with them with sensitivity and empathy, leading them on a journey towards the new brand and gaining their buy-in along the way.
It was always our plan to bring onboard a Marketing Director to join our experienced executive team. We therefore knew that now was the right time to find an accomplished Marketing Director to join our executive team and so we started the recruitment process.
What made you approach Intelligent People?
Mary-Anne McIntyre, our CEO, had received a good recommendation from a friend about Intelligent People and their services.
Although there are quite a few big recruitment players within the financial services industry, we actively wanted to approach an agency with experience in other fields to give us a fresh perspective and access to a broader range of candidates. We were drawn to marketing domain experts, rather than financial services experts.
On reaching out to Intelligent People, we were put in contact with co-founder, Chris, and agreed to proceed with an executive search on a retained basis.
What services did Intelligent People provide?
Amber River as a business is already accustomed to working with recruitment agencies on a retained basis, especially for key executive appointments like this one.
Taking on an executive search on a retained basis with Intelligent People meant two things for us: 1) Chris and his team were able to complete a market mapping exercise, ensuring hiring a Marketing Director was indeed the right way forward for us and 2) there was dedicated time & focus from Chris and the team to undertake the search with the best support in place possible to achieve our goals quickly.
Chris was able to help with the executive search process from end-to-end, including everything from finessing the job description, mapping out salary expectations, putting together the recruitment process, delivering a shortlist, interview preparation and managing the offer negotiations
We found the whole process to be extremely well managed – Chris was able to challenge our thinking where we needed it, but he also listened to our needs and showed flexibility to our existing recruitment processes. The way in which Chris and his team worked was complimentary to us, a real partnership. There was no ‘one size fits all approach’ and that allowed the whole executive search process to run smoothly.
What was the outcome of the retained executive search?
Intelligent People did a brilliant executive search, providing a quality list of very engaged candidates to us extremely quickly. The quality of the shortlist we received is testament to the expertise and service offering within Intelligent People.
We couldn’t be happier with Intelligent People as our executive search recruitment partner for this role.
Further marketing case studies
Chief Marketing Officer placement at Goodfellow
Intelligent People did a brilliant executive search, providing a quality list of very engaged Marketing Director candidates to us extremely quickly. The quality of the shortlist we received is testament to the expertise and service offering within Intelligent People. We couldn’t be happier with Intelligent People as our executive search recruitment partner for this role. Read the full case study.
