Birmingham Children’s Partnerships | David Godfrey

To recruit a Director of Transformation for Birmingham Children’s Partnership; a joint health and social care programme of work across six partner organisations.

Many previous attempts had been made across Birmingham to improve the health and education of children over the years, however none with such high profile buy-in as the Birmingham Children’s Partnership, which had no less than four Chief Executives sponsoring the programme along with a Board member from each organisation involved in the recruitment process.

An attempt to recruit this post through internal and direct methods had been made earlier in the year, so it was imperative that the recruitment was successful this time round in order to keep the Programme on track.

After taking a thorough brief on site with the client with two lead stakeholders of the Programme to get an understanding on what their requirements were and why the previous internally managed process had not managed to identify a strong enough candidate pool, Hunter were engaged on an exclusive basis to recruit the post, adhering to a strict timescale.

The previous process had attracted a large field, but not the right type of candidate required to deliver this complex programme of work. The ideal candidate needed to have experience of both working in and with healthcare in addition to working in Children’s Services in local government, coupled with a strong track record of delivering genuine transformational and sustainable change.

Hunter reworked the advertising and candidate attraction copy materials to be used, along with using a targeted national headhunting campaign, identifying candidates whose experience matched all the attributes required, understanding that this was going to be a relatively small pool. The key would be delivering a message to these candidates as to why this was such an attractive and well-backed opportunity to make a genuine change in an area historically associated with inadequate Childrens’ Health and Education standards due to a lack of collaborative working across the relevant partner organisations.

With two candidates successfully being appointable from the final shortlist, the appointment of Richard Selwyn was made. Richard is an experienced Associate Director and Transformation Leader, about whom Rachel O’Connor, Assistant Chief Executive –Birmingham and Solihull STP, said: