Kicking Off the Search for Talent

SRI specialise in placing executive and management talent into some of the biggest names in the sporting world, such as The Rugby Football Union, The Premier League, and Arsenal and Manchester City football clubs. They have the largest team of sports specialist search consultants in the world, operating from offices in London, Switzerland, Australia and Singapore.

Their mission is to transform the way the sports industry works, using their unrivalled network of international contacts and candidates. Jim Chaplin, European Managing Partner, discusses how the world of sports recruitment has changed in recent years and how their investment in executive search software from Invenias has driven their move to modernise their processes.

He said: “Even ten or fifteen years ago the recruitment of top level sports executive positions was primitive and lacked proper hiring processes. It wasn’t unheard of for former players to take up commercial roles within a club shortly after their retirement from playing. Today, sport is becoming increasingly sophisticated and sports organisations require candidates with excellent commercial acumen to come in and take the business to the next level. It’s accelerating very fast due to the globalisation of the industry and advent of digital.”

SRI have a vast network of contacts globally, with 13 years of relationship data and over 40,000 candidate records. To effectively manage the global search process they were looking for a cloud-based solution; that could be accessed in real time by their consultants across the world; that was intuitive and easy to use and fully integrated with Outlook. After reviewing the systems available on the market they concluded that only Invenias ticked all the boxes for them.

In any industry with such high profile brands the number of applicants can be considerably higher than equivalent roles in less glamorous fields. Therefore, the ability to work on the database anytime and anywhere is a huge bonus.

“We always get huge numbers of applicants for positions,” Chaplin commented. “So from our consultants’ point of view, the ability to manage those effectively and efficiently in Invenias enables them to spend more time winning business and proactively searching for candidates as opposed to just responding to applications.

“The ability to access client and candidate information anytime and from any device is a great feature and with Invenias you don’t have to be connected to the internet. For example, you can run through a few things on the train home, on a plane or wherever you may be, update the information on your phone or iPad and then it all seamlessly synchronises with the database when you next connect to the internet. That’s the kind of thing we were really looking for Invenias to help us with.”

Sport is a truly global business. With clients and candidates based around the world, the consultants at Sports Recruitment International all need to access to the same data, whether they are based in London, Singapore or Sydney. It is essential that they deliver the same service level and standards regardless of location. “Our clients demand a seamless experience with us, regardless of whether they are in London, Beijing or Rio. With Invenias we can be sure that we are all able to work as a global team, accessing the same information in real time and delivering the standard of service expected,” comments Chaplin.

Sport has become big business and the increasingly sophisticated brands are requiring a higher calibre of talent. This inevitably means looking outside of sport for talent, and capturing a vast amount of varied information about potential candidates. The ability to search the existing database for people with very specific skills has become much quicker and easier since implementing Invenias.

Chaplin believes that this rapidly changing environment requires his businesses to keep up with the latest technology. He said: “Invenias is a more progressive, next generation executive search software system. We see ourselves as a progressive business looking to grow and constantly find new ways of attracting talent, so it’s essential that we’re aligned with a business that’s got those ambitions as well.