First-ever roles: how to search for a job nobody has done in your sector

Some of the searches we are proudest of were for roles that did not exist until the client created them. The first combined shared services leader in UK higher education. The first bid and commercial capability in a defence business that had never had one. The first UK business development director for an American manufacturer that had just bought a British company.

They are the hardest searches to run and the ones most often given to the wrong firm.

The brief cannot come from inside

Nobody in the organisation has done the job, so nobody can write it from experience. The brief has to be built from people who have: leaders who have set up the equivalent function in another sector, and the organisations that have already made the change. We spend the first two weeks of a first-ever search finding and talking to those people before we write a word.

The market is somewhere else

By definition, the sector cannot supply the candidate. The map has to cross into sectors where the function is established. For the university role, that meant people who had launched shared services in banking, retail and central government. For the defence bid role, commercial leaders from adjacent regulated industries. The map is smaller than usual and the approach has to explain, carefully, why someone should move sectors for it.

The panel has to change how it assesses

Panels default to sector experience because it is easy to check. For a first-ever role it is the wrong test. We build the assessment criteria with the panel before the shortlist arrives: what the person has to have done, in any sector, and what they have to be able to do here. Then we interview against those criteria first and present the evidence.

The employer brand problem

A newly created role in a newly formed business has no track record to sell. Candidates ask what the role will look like in three years and nobody knows. The honest answer, written into the candidate pack, is the plan and the difficulties. Senior people are persuaded by candour more often than by polish.

Timing

Allow eight weeks rather than six. The extra fortnight is the research at the front. It is the difference between a shortlist and a guess.