Headhunter Anita Hoffmann and Chair of the Institute of Business Ethics Professor David Grayson CBE explain how Nurole helped them boost board diversity

Anita Hoffmann, managing director of executive search firm Executiva, and an advisor on the nominations committee of the Institute of Business Ethics, and Professor David Grayson CBE, Chair of the Institute of Business Ethics, talk through how they used Nurole to throw a wider net over a search for trustees for the Institute of Business Ethics.

What was it about Nurole that made it particularly useful for recruiting for the Institute of Business Ethics?

David: We had a large number of trustees to appoint and I asked Anita, who is an external advisor to the Institute of Business Ethics, to coordinate the search and she suggested Nurole as the best option.

Anita: We used Nurole for the trustee search, because it’s really useful when you need to cast your net very wide and when you don’t have a specific sector or a specific set of companies or organisations that you can recruit from.

David: That’s a very good summary. It was a very significant exercise to bring in a number of new trustees in one go and we wanted to make sure that we were casting the net widely, so it wasn’t just going to people we already knew.

How do you whittle down a large number of applications that are all on paper fantastic?

David: With a great deal of difficulty and a huge amount of hard work by Anita, who produced very helpful mapping against the key areas that we were looking for, so we ended up with a long-list that we finally whittled down to about thirty people, whom we interviewed over the course of three days.

We then evaluated all of the people we interviewed against the key areas of expertise that we were wanting to add around the board table.

How did you find the quantity and the quality of Nurole applicants?

David: We were enormously pleased with not just the quantity, but also the quality of the applications that we received. We were very impressed by the majority of the applications that we had, and it was a difficult decision to get the balance right between the different parts of the skills matrix that we wanted to cover off on the board.

We often find that Nurole leads to other opportunities within organisations, even if the initial board role doesn’t work out, did this happen in your case?

David: Yes. We appointed seven new trustees via Nurole and other sources. We ended up appointing an additional four to our international advisory council, and we may well be offering another two people roles here too in due course. We had so many great people, we wanted to keep more of them involved.

In 2020, we are going to set up a short-life task force that will report to the board to help us do a deep dive on a review of our profile and the positioning of the Institute of Business Ethics' brand, and the people who will be part of that will be primarily people who came through Nurole. We didn’t appoint them to the main board, but we think that they have the skills and commitment and interest that we want to harness.

We have also provided a free individual membership to the Institute of Business Ethics for a year to several of the people who came through Nurole, purely because we are keen to keep in touch with them. Hopefully, during the course of that year, we will find some extra ways that we can work together.

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