Talent That Transforms Businesses

We work with dynamic organisations to place and develop change-makers that will have a positive and long-lasting impact.

Our Services

We take a broad, collaborative, and creative approach to identifying potential candidates.

Through the entire search process, we work in partnership to guide you through and make sure you see the candidates that will make a real change to your organisation. We do the groundwork with feedback, market, and search intelligence. To guarantee that we identify the best possible candidates to fit your company needs, we run competency interviews as well as leadership and culture assessments.

At Holmes Noble we believe in diversity of thought and we drive progressive change as a result of it. We go beyond the ordinary to deliver exceptional results. With diverse industry and functional backgrounds, we think differently about each search journey we embark on. It is important that we give you innovative solutions and challenge the status quo so you get  dynamic candidates that will help drive your business forward. We have an unconventional approach to search which identifies and attracts talent from sectors and regions that may previously have been inaccessible or unexplored.

Our Process

Discovery

We take a deep dive into your business to understand your exact needs. We ask the difficult questions to make sure you get a candidate that matches your culture and role requirements. This helps us understand your team on a deeper level to be able to match its dynamics. The discovery is the foundation for success.

Search

By using innovative, progressive strategies, we find the talent that will elevate your team. We think creatively about the candidate search and give you the unexpected. Every step of the way, you get insights into your sector so your business can be as competitive as possible to attract the best doers and thinkers in your field.

Placement

After a rigorous vetting process, you’ll interview the best people on the market. We support you with sector and candidate intelligence to ensure you are fully equipped. We want you to find the right person that will take your business to the next level. You won’t be abandoned – we’re there for you from the interview and beyond.

Beyond

You will have support from us even beyond the hiring process. Having a team which is consistently delivering exceptional results requires a dynamic approach. We help you make sure that your team is driven and focused on elevating your organisation. With a team of executive coaches and chartered psychologists, we give your leaders the skills so they can set the pace and leverage their full potential.

Our executive search process at Holmes Noble

Executive Interim

Whether facilitating change, overseeing vital projects, driving growth, managing mergers & acquisitions, or delivering turnaround scenarios, interim managers can provide a breadth of experience and best practice to drive lasting improvement. We place interim candidates that will bring years of experience to drive the transformation you need to accelerate your organisation. Holmes Noble’s executive interim offering complements our portfolio of executive search and wider solutions.

Executive interim search agency

Benefit from immediate, flexible resources without the fixed overheads of a permanent appointment.

Interim managers provide a fresh and independent viewpoint on important business decisions and can act as a valuable partner to the board in shaping the strategic and operational future of the business. The right candidate will support your transformation journey.

We combine significant experience to develop and maintain a pre-selected pool of leading interim talent. Each individual has maximised the potential of organisations and has made a difference through dynamic, creative programmes and strategies. They have all demonstrated unrivalled achievements in their fields.

Coaching and Leadership Development

OUR APPROACH MITIGATES FAILURE

It’s well documented that the things that are important to people in their professional lives are: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Holmes Noble helps build high-performance leaders, teams, organisations, and cultures. From assessing and developing leaders, to ensuring the effectiveness of teams and organisations, to giving clients the tools they need to shape productive, effective cultures, Holmes Noble is focused on one thing: advancing businesses through people.

Leadership development coaching

Onboarding – Coaching through the first 100 days

It’s more than just placing the right candidate. We combine executive search with assessment and onboarding, to ensure that your new team members are set up for success. With our 100-day onboarding programme, we help your latest hire hit the ground running and accelerate to the pace where they create value for your organisation. Making sure that the onboarding is done right will increase the success and help combat any unforeseen issues. We work with you to ensure that you can elevate your business.

Consulting

To make sure you can deliver your corporate strategic agenda, we support you by building people strategies that will have a high impact on your business goals. Your strategic objectives, board priorities, and leadership strength needs to be aligned to ensure that you maximise the potential of your organisation. We help build strong programmes so that you can be confident in delivering your goals.

Business consulting services

Horizon Scanning

Holmes Noble has developed a horizon scanning process to bring external validation through independent market research and challenge. This allows boards to prioritise activities to accelerate growth and minimise strategic risks. Horizon scanning can include a wide range of issues covering political, economic, social, and technological trends which will be tailored to the your market and specific circumstances. A typical programme encompass the following stages:

Interviews with internal team members to understand key drivers for their areas of the business

External market assessment, research and validation of issues.

Strategy workshop to assess findings and provide board alignment on the key priorities.

Addressing the future talent challenge: understanding, identifying, and attracting future generations and diverse talent – implications for EVP and brand messaging

Developing defined action plans and understanding the impact on talent strategies and requirements.

Talent Pipelining and Succession Planning

Talent pipelining comes in handy whenever you have visibility of incoming changes that require forward planning and a pool of candidates that you may need to bring into the business over a period of time. This could be to support a new market entry, contract award and mobilisation, or where you require to build or replace a specific niche skillset. We can engage with the market, identify and build bench strength, maintain candidates’ interest over time, and turn on hiring as your needs solidify.

This allows a shorter time to hire and a pool of engaged candidates ready to access. This approach can also be used to identify team-based moves to make an immediate impact in a new market. We can also work with you to deliver a strong succession plan, assessing the depth of internal talent and augmenting this with external candidates where necessary to ensure that there is a robust process with alternatives to de-risk the ongoing business viability.

Due Diligence Support

Sell Side

In preparation for disposal or when seeking external investment, you may wish to ensure that the executive leadership team is in the best shape possible to be attractive in the market. We provide an independent assessment of the management team and how attractive they may appear to external investors, using our proven experience in executive search and access to a network of investors who provide regular updates on what they look for in management teams.

 

 

Buy Side

On a buy side assignment we play a range of roles on behalf of companies and investors. We provide a deal sourcing service, using our expertise in identifying companies and executives operating in the desired space. We also provide a detailed management assessment and referencing service, digging under the skin of a proposed acquisition or investment and unearthing issues or concerns early, to reduce the talent-related risks associated with a new acquisition or integration.

Assessment

Skillset and character are equally important for talent to be able to maximise the impact they have on your organisation. With psychometric and behavioural assessment tools we make sure that your talent is right for your team and business. You get a richer, more in-depth understanding of the behaviours and with the full picture you set yourself and your organisation up for success. 

Our assessment can both be a part of your executive search assignment as well as for other business-related learning and developmental needs. We assess and develop leaders, ensuring they have the skill set to accelerate your organisation, and give you the tools you need to shape a high-performing team culture.

Finding the right talent through the correct assessment

Cultural and Leadership Competency Framework Development

We support you through building a comprehensive competency framework development process. This shows the leadership competencies required to deliver your strategy. The framework builds on a foundation of leadership and cultural best practice and is tailored to your business, strategy, and the particular roles in the organisation. This provides a common framework to give consistent expectations across the business. We offer a full suite of documentation which analyses each of these competencies from level 1 (development area) to level 5 (best in class) along with the appropriate desired target levels.

As well as developing the framework, we also provide an independent assessment option where we will interview your existing team to identify the current status and how well equipped they are to deliver the strategy. This can help show capability gaps as well as development areas for leaders which can be addressed through our executive coaching offering.

Psychometrics

Our chartered business psychologists and executive coaches minimise risk through a range of  assessment profiling tools that provide insights into candidates’ potential and their leadership behaviour. This approach means we take a comprehensive view to candidate assessment, providing you with objective information to enable you to make your hiring decisions with confidence.  We use a range of psychometric tests and investigative behavioural interviewing techniques to give a complete assessment of suitability for the role and the business, and explore the impact they may have on their organisations and teams.

Transformation Talent Programmes

Our end-to-end talent transformation programme approach supports a wide range of scenarios, tailored to your individual situation. This can cover restructuring programmes, merger identification and integration, new market entry, organisational design, succession planning and talent pipelining of niche skillsets.

Transformation talent programmes at Holmes Noble

In significant transformation programmes we combine a range of services to provide end-to-end leadership solutions.

It starts with aligning the future strategy and desired competencies. We run independent interview programmes to assess existing leadership teams, including psychometric testing and business case presentations to provide a fully rounded overview of candidates. All of this can also be benchmarked with the external talent market to ensure that the leadership teams take your business into the future, and are the correct fit to deliver the strategy. Once leaders are appointed, we offer a detailed onboarding and executive coaching service to ensure the team operates efficiently and effectively from day one.

Looking to hire?

Tell us more about the role you’re hiring for, what kind of candidate you are seeking, and what your company culture is like, and we’ll get to work.