Case studies
Derby and Derbyshire CCG
Several Roles Including:
- Financial Accountants
- Management Accountants
- Financial Planning Accountants
Client Profile
NHS Derby and Derbyshire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) brings together the combined expertise of 112 local GP practices, to commission health services on behalf of over 1,072,000 patients in Derbyshire. This involves planning, agreeing, and monitoring the NHS’s intricate and numerous services.
The Group’s vision is to continuously improve the health and wellbeing of the people of Derbyshire, using all resources as fairly as possible. Their work includes providing local clinical leadership to the NHS, understanding the population and addressing inequalities, and aiming to secure the best quality, best value health and social care services they can afford.
Assignment
After Robertson Bell had been in contact with their hiring manager, Derby and Derbyshire CCG reached out for a rapid solution to their hiring challenges. The client required multiple new hires and various skillsets. Despite this, due to the urgency of the situation they were very flexible on the shape of the roles candidates might fill.
This unique scenario meant that instead of looking to fill specific positions, they asked Robertson Bell to source talent at various levels who they could then integrate into the existing team – perhaps even moving around roles internally to make the best use of skills that were already present. As such, the client was keen to speak with people from a number of key roles, ranging from; Financial Accountants to help them with year-end management, and Management Accountants to help with their monthly reporting, to Financial Planning Accountants – a more senior remit, to lead on their financial planning.
Considerations and challenges
The broad brief meant that the search could be quite flexible. It would also potentially require considerable resource to proactively search what was a significant pool of talent, so it called for all hands-on-deck to ensure a quick turnaround – especially given the time of year these roles were requested.
Indeed, the client contacted Robertson Bell during the Christmas period – a time of year that is traditionally a challenging one for hiring managers due to the number of back-office functions slowing or shutting down ahead of the festive break. We were also keen to ensure the client had as many candidates as possible in their roles going into the new year.
Solution
Despite the client having reached out to other agencies, we were able to deliver a bespoke service and build a strong relationship with them whilst providing reassurance that we would be putting all our energy into finding a solution to their current hiring challenge.
The team reached out to the Financial Controller in order to collect as much information as possible, drilling down to understand the organisation’s true priorities and creating a thorough brief to source the best talent to fit their needs.
We were keen to give the Financial Controller the confidence that we understood their requirements and shaped our recommendations around their primary needs. Based on this information we suggested prioritising the financial planning role as no one in the current team had the expertise to be able to help in this space, and the interim financial accounting role.
The client approached the Robertson Bell team in the morning and by close of play that first day we had shared nine applications. By the end of day two, we had shared 15. We were the only agency able to provide applications within that time frame.
Outcome
The Chief Financial Officer was very pleased with this outcome and felt that due to the quality of the applications, he was able to select which he wanted to move forward to interview.
Initially, due to their urgent need for candidates, the client was willing to be more flexible on the NHS experience of the candidates, so we made sure to include talent from the wider public sector and not-for-profit sector. We were, however, delighted to be able to source a number of candidates with relevant NHS experience, giving the client a variety to choose from. The client brought all of these through to interview within around 48 hours.
The client decided to appoint into two roles, both through Robertson Bell. The entire hiring process was completed before Christmas and both candidates were in their roles by mid-January.
Our consultants’ focus on taking a rigorous brief and taking the time to build a relationship to truly understand the client’s needs, really set them apart from the competition on this case.
Robertson Bell’s market experience and consultant expertise means that they are able to make credible suggestions that might be outside of the client’s initial remit but fit the needs that the client has described or may bring different skills and experience that would have otherwise been missed.
The speed of this placement was something the team were especially pleased with. The client has since reached out again to Robertson Bell for support and we look forward to working with them again in the future.