The Re-branded Recruit
as they Prepare
• Headquartered in the
UK with an extensive
international footprint
• Over 30 years experience
of placing people in key
positions
• AESC Member Firm
• A company committed
to equality: CEO Sue
O’Brien awarded an OBE
for services to Gender
Equality in January 2014
• Practice areas include;
Consumer, Private Equity,
Financial Services, Energy
& Natural Resources, Life
Sciences & Healthcare,
Leisure & Travel, Retail,
Professional Services,
Technology, Media &
Telecoms
Norman Broadbent’s CEO talks about turning
around the brand, recruiting new people and
embracing technology.
Today, and for decades, Norman Broadbent has been renowned and
respected for the insight offered by its employees. However, five years
ago this was not the case. In 2008, as current CEO Sue O’Brien says, the
business had lost its way; “it had been shrunk to a core team that was
still delivering excellent work for a very minimal number of clients, and
therefore should really have been a standalone partnership.”
Seeing an opportunity, Garner acquired the company to re-launch it as
a PLC. O’Brien says: “The strategy behind acquiring the business was
largely around wanting to get a brand that had good recognition at board
level, it had a very fond remembrance in the minds of executives that
had either been placed by the organisation or had indeed enjoyed some
of the insights, skills and advice that the people within the business had
delivered in its heyday which would’ve been probably 15 years earlier.”
Having got the name, O’Brien and her team went about turning it round,
to have it seen, once again, as a contender; “hiring was interesting. There
were a number of people in the first year that would never dream of
working with us because they felt it was a tired brand. Within a 12-to-24month period most of those people were saying “can I come and have
a coffee?” So the ability to really turn around the brand and create it as
a challenger worked exceptionally well, but we are probably just as fussy
about who we hire for ourselves as we are about who we help c Y[