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Why Freshminds for Experienced & Executive candidates?
We often get told by our senior candidates that they don’t necessarily feel particularly like a Fresh Mind after 5 years plus of experience, but we beg to differ. Taking over very naturally from where our Graduate and Early Careers team leave off, we have been growing our network at the senior end for many years now. Specifically, in the last 5 years, the experienced team has grown and we have been making a conscious effort to help our senior network. From this, we have been having a lot of success placing experienced and executive candidates across a wide range of roles in a myriad of different functions and sectors.
We have rapidly recognised that our 18-year-old candidate network is full of excellent contacts, leading us to become experts in advising senior candidates as to where their skill sets might be best used. As well as providing access and visibility to a wide range of roles that are not always immediately obvious in the marketplace.
Similarly, this means that our clients are able to use us as a gauge of the market and we often offer advice on creating job descriptions and on the various nuances that come into play when hiring senior positions. As such with both clients and candidates we aim to build long-standing partnerships knowing full well that it is not every day that you need to hire a senior candidate, but when that day comes we are often already in contact with people who might be interested.
Q) What candidates work with the Experienced and Executive Hire team?
A) We are dedicated to working with candidates who broadly speaking have a significant amount of experience already under their belt and are looking for the next step in their career. Whether this means dealing with the classic exit points of the consulting world; post MBA / Pre-Partner track, helping people from larger corporates with their first forays into the start-up or SME world or helping people into their first investment roles in PE and VC.
Given the breadth of different opportunities, we work on, we are well used to dealing with a vast array of different backgrounds and skill sets. However, we have learnt to really probe and understand our candidate’s transferable skills and passions enabling us to dig out the slightly off-piste and hopefully more interesting roles for people that can be harder to find.
Broadly speaking we look for people with varying degrees of the below:
The Consulting Skillset (which can be gained from both in-house teams as well as the professional services world).
In-house Managerial/Operational skill set –Including the responsibilities and multiple roles that this can involve.
A specific sector or functional overlay – i.e. a specialism and deep sector / functional knowledge.
Q) At Freshminds what roles do the Experienced & Executive Hire team focus on?
A) Given the breadth of experience and backgrounds, we deal with this is a hard question to answer succinctly. It is safe to say we are always open to discussing roles with clients and candidate no matter how seemingly niche they might be!
That said in terms of sectors we have always had a particularly strong capability within; Corporate Development, Strategy and M&A teams in major Blue Chips, Investment Manager to Investment Partner roles across PE, VC or Family Offices. High growth SMEs or post series C start-ups have always been a consistent strength for us and some of the more interesting and harder to find roles tend to come from this space. Professional services remains a strong sector given our focus on the “consulting skill set”. Outside of this, we have also recently made senior placements across: Education, MedTech, Fintech, Real Estate, Aviation, Digital Marketing, Strategy/Data consulting, Retail & Consumer, Hotel & Leisure and the list goes on.
In terms of functional roles, we tend to look at a wide range of C-Suite opportunities for SMEs/Directors / Heads of and Managers. We also typically work a lot on Chief-of-Staff type positions.
Q) What is the candidate process at Freshminds?
A) We aim to meet all of our candidates face-to-face before we put them forward for a role as we are firm believers that this is vital for a successful partnership with candidate and client alike.
As a result of this, we actively avoid bombarding clients with hundreds of CVs and instead aim to work with high calibre shortlists of c. 3 candidates who we have compared against the market and the network, these candidates are interviewed and gauged to be properly excellent for the role at hand.
So for every candidate CV a client receives from Freshminds there have been multiple phone screens and subsequent face-to-face interviews to whittle it down to the people we believe are truly the best fit for the role.
Q) What about the Executive side of the team?
A) Broadly speaking all of the above applies to our Executive offering and we have been building a successful track record in the new wave of C-Suite individuals that we are seeing across the marketplace. Whilst we by no means are claiming to be a traditional Executive Search firm we have found that our most senior candidates are in high demand and those with 15 plus years’ experience with the blend of skills described above are commanding a lot of interest. Whilst there are obviously fewer roles for the more senior candidates, the incisive placement of an excellent C-Suite individual is vital and the well-rounded transferable skill set we focus on acts as a great foundation for the sector or functional overlay whether that is as a CFO, COO, CTO, CSO etc.
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