Resource & Welfare Director

The Role:

eXPD8

The Client:

eXPD8 (Field Marketing & Services Consultancy) is a provider of retail support services to retailers, suppliers and manufacturers across the UK and Ireland.

These services include compliance audits, retail intelligence, product merchandising, promotional set-ups, relays and refits, ordering, stocktaking and product returns.

Established in 2003, eXPD8’s roots lie in retail and the team’s wealth of sector experience and knowledge enables eXPD8 to engage with clients and retailers alike, delivering quality results, first time… every time. This retail heritage and unique business model has allowed eXPD8 to grow significantly and it now operates from a modern central Bristol office, employing a skilled and motivated field workforce of over 2,500 across the UK and Ireland.

The business model is underpinned by a state-of-the-art scheduling, call management and questionnaire system, supported by award winning tablet deployment in the field. This unique business model and smart technology enables eXPD8 to minimise the travel mileage of their field team by managing resource at a local level. Tablet technology enables their digital briefs to be updated in real-time saving paper and reducing energy wasted on queries or re-visits.

The Challenge

Moon Executive Search was approached by co-Founder, Mark Thurgood, to undertake a confidential and bespoke search to appoint a Resource and Welfare Director to support the business.

The role was designed to provide an invaluable link between field-based staff and Head Office, ensuring the right staff were recruited, inducted and engaged at all levels throughout the organisation. Given the competitive nature of the sector, it was also critical that any appointed candidate could demonstrate real innovation and creative thinking when designing a new talent management strategy (encompassing recruitment, retention and reward) to keep eXPD8 one step ahead of their competition.

In addition, given that the business operates at significant pace and is focused on providing quick and efficient solutions to its customer base, in undertaking this search, we were mindful of the need to identify a suitably qualified HR professional who could offer strategic input, clear decision-making abilities and an eye for detail.

The search was to be conducted confidentially, utilising candidate NDAs prior to any specific company disclosures.

Our Approach

After receiving an in-depth brief from the Directors covering the technical prerequisite skills needed and an overview of the cultural considerations, we immediately embarked on detailed research to consider candidates with the right level of relevant HR experience from both the retail sector and aligned industries.

The campaign was led by Director of Search Simon Quinn. Whilst he and his team considered national candidates for the search, who would consider a relocation to the South West, our focus was on drilling into the local talent pool for this search. After establishing a suitable longlist of target candidates, we made specific approaches and ensured we took suitable targets under an NDA to continue to more detailed briefings. We then met with those that provided the best alignment to the brief to draw out further information to present to Mark and his team.

The Solution

In terms of the focus of our candidate meetings, we asked a series of questions designed to establish suitability, ranging from their research and understanding about the challenge at eXPD8, through to their technical HR knowledge, cultural alignment to the eXPD8 company values and their own career motivations.

The search resulted in the successful appointment of a Resource and Welfare Director, although the search was not concluded at this point. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the candidate was unable to start with the business for nearly 9 months. During this time, our role was to facilitate communication at the appropriate times and ensure that we maintained regular contact with all parties. Eventually in January 2021, we were delighted that the candidate could join the business. This is testimony to both the professionalism shown by eXPD8 throughout the delay and the patience of the candidate who remained committed to joining the business.

As a result, we feel the appointed candidate offers eXPD8 significant commercial experience, with a strong track record in change and project management. They have a wealth of experience of delivering talent, performance management and engagement strategies to drive a high-performance culture and they are adept at working in fast paced, customer focused environment.

Simon Quinn, Director of Search said:

‘It was a genuine pleasure to support Mark and eXPD8 with this search. The business is hugely impressive and offers such an innovative solution to its clients. It provides a modern working environment in Bristol and clearly values its employees and their contribution to eXPD8’s ongoing success. I am confident that despite the delay to onboarding the candidate due to the pandemic, they will now add much to their strategic HR approach.’

Mark Thurgood, co-Founder said,

‘The whole process was well managed via Simon at Moon Exec Search. There was an appropriate level of communication with regular progress updates provided, which gave me confidence the search was being well managed throughout. The result was, I met with a shortlist of great candidates and felt confident that our ultimate choice of candidate was the best fit for what we were looking for.’

The eXPD8 interview with successful candidate Jess Marsh is available here.