The Challenge

The pensions market is seeing unprecedented levels of change. Traditional ways of serving this industry are under threat and points of differentiation are at a premium. As a global professional services firm and a trusted advisor to some of the world’s most influential organisations, our client needed to diversify its service offerings to remain at the forefront of the pensions advisory market. In response, they devised a leading edge broad DC pensions product.

Developing the product was one thing but taking it to market and sustainably growing uptake required a specific type of individual to lead the charge and create followership across the firm. That was our challenge.

All firms are after similar people. The DC market is highly competitive and there is a finite amount of game-changing talent to differentiate and drive market share. What was needed was a natural hunter with an excellent leadership style who could build and lead teams and who would align culturally with the client’s organisation.

This type of individual is not walking the streets looking for their next role.

The Solution

The challenge was finding a balanced leadership style that was culturally aligned to our client but also able to drive excellence through sales and marketing activities, the requisite experience of pensions services and products and the gravitas and credibility needed to establish and operationalise a strategic vision for growth.

Through engaging eg.1 the client was able to understand the full and interrogable talent landscape across direct and associated competitors. eg.1 advised that the usual suspects of rival organisations were unlikely to provide this leader. More importantly, by demonstrating the paucity of quality talent eg.1 was able to promote a more diverse research strategy, identifying the core attributes and transferable skills needed for success.

As a result of this exercise the client not only received a more diverse pool of candidates but also key competitive information around career motivations, remuneration levels and benchmarking of their own internal talent. This equipped the client with a fully informed view of who they were bringing in to interview and what they needed to do to secure the incoming leader against the myriad of competitors.

The Outcome

Our client was ultimately able to hire an industry recognised name who has built a ‘hunter’ focused team. Today this individual is successfully generating revenue and making positive changes in the ever-evolving DC pensions world.

In addition, eg.1 delivered detailed insight into the DC market, including competitive intelligence on consulting, pension providers and employee benefit organisations. Our client benefitted from a fluid process and quicker decision making, and the candidate interview to placement ratio was 3:1. By acting as an extension of our client’s brand, we were also able to provide broader PR and raise market awareness of the new DC proposition.