Ivy Rock Partners is a specialist search and recruitment support firm, helping its clients to identify and recruit candidates for senior finance roles. They work with a range of local authorities and here they share their experience of the challenges and opportunities.
Ivy Rock Partners is a specialist search and recruitment support firm for organisations with a social purpose. It helps its client organisations to identify and recruit candidates for executive, finance, human resources, information technology and change management roles. The firm works with a range of local authorities, as well as with other clients across the public and not-for-profit sectors.
Ivy Rock Partners recognises that local authorities face challenges in identifying and attracting suitable candidates for finance roles. Furthermore, it has observed an increase in staff turnover within local authorities as they face growing financial challenges and organisational uncertainty. This has exacerbated further an already difficult market for staff recruitment.
The firm is keen to draw from the widest possible pool of talent when identifying potential candidates for its client organisations. It recognises, however, that many local authorities are reluctant to consider candidates from outside the public sector – or even from outside local government – when recruiting to finance roles.
Such authorities are concerned that individuals with no previous local government experience might struggle to get to grips with the nuances of local authority finance and with the nature of local authorities’ financial governance and decision-making processes. Consequently, recruiting from outside the local government sector is seen by many authorities as a risky choice.
To help to address these concerns, Ivy Rock Partners is assembling a panel of recently-retired local government finance professionals – or some who are taking a step back in their careers – who can provide mentoring support to individuals recruited to local authority finance roles from outside the sector, or even those taking a step up in a challenging role.
Funded by the recruiting organisation, the mentor provides support and a sounding board to the new recruit as they transition into their new role and helps them to hit the ground running. This could be meeting as little as once a month.
This approach, while in its early days, is giving reassurance to organisations that they can de-risk the recruitment process for local authorities. It is also helping to attract candidates from outside the sector to local government finance roles, as it makes the move to the local government sector less risky for them, too.
This use of mentoring support to ease the transition process for new recruits and their employers is something that local authorities can replicate for themselves. Larger local authorities may be able to establish a similar arrangement internally, while smaller ones may find it easier to do so in partnership with other authorities in their region or through a facilitating body such as, for example, their CIPFA regional council.
More on financial recruitment
Find out more about our Financial Recruitment Project and read our case studies.
