Co-op Group Recruits a Leader to Take Funerals Into the Future

Following a competitive tender, Green Park was chosen to fill a uniquely interesting position, finding a commercial leader who would help take the Co-op’s sizeable funeral service business and infrastructure into the future. It was a newly created role that requires innovative and disruptive thinking from someone outside the industry. The funeral industry has been evolving and adapting significantly in recent years. The Co-op maintains excellent service provision by fostering continued evolution with creative thinking. To support their high-performing, empathetic teams with this crucial external hire, Green Park looked beyond the obvious talent pool, focusing on a skills-first approach and found the exceptional talent required for this brief.

• Green Park’s DEI expertise helped win this competitive tender
• Consultants made sufficient time for extensive briefing
• Our team scoured relevant talent markets with comparable service-led, regulated market segments
• Five exceptional candidates made the diverse shortlist
• The successful candidate has now been selected to take the Co-op into the future

The Challenge

With over 70,000 staff and more than 2,500 stores, the Co-op is a mainstay retail brand. It is also the largest provider of funeral and end-of-life services in the UK. However, fewer and fewer people are asking for traditional funerals due to cultural or economic changes. As people choose increasingly unique and unusual ways to say goodbye to loved ones – from celebration parties and pure cremation to mushroom burial suits – the Co-op needs to innovate and adapt to service changing customer requirements.

The business therefore created a new role: Head of Client Contracts & Services. This leader will navigate a rapidly evolving industry, ensuring the Co-op remains at the forefront by innovatively enhancing its offerings. In a sector that hadn’t changed significantly for centuries, this was a ground-breaking shift. The successful candidate will be responsible for the go-to-market strategy and for ensuring Life Services is fit for the future. This means taking hundreds of staff through a journey where they will be ready for a more modern, but consistently empathetic, customer service model. It would also mean pursuing new avenues, for example, multi-faith funerals.

With these far-reaching changes, the Co-op wanted a leader from outside the funeral industry: a candidate who was used to a heavily regulated environment and someone who will bring commercially astute strategic thinking. It was a hugely challenging task, especially given the potential stigma attached to the funeral industry, and migrating first-class talent in from outside the sector.

The Process

After a competitive tender process, the Co-op entrusted Green Park with this challenge, recognising our expertise in DE&I and our innovative approach to navigating the talent landscape as key factors in their decision. With a clear brief to search beyond the funeral industry, the team set to work. They used a ‘Skills-First’ approach, looking at other verticals, which produced 157 viable profiles. This was reduced to 72 in the first stage of the selection process. The next stage saw this group reduced to 28 of the most suitable individuals, and then to nine longlisted candidates.

The Results

Of the nine, five were selected to go through to a final shortlist. All had the transferable skills necessary for the Head of Client & Contracts post. They also had a diverse range of backgrounds and lived experience to provide the Co-op an informed choice, further enriching the diversity of leaders at the Co-op. The client was delighted and chose the most suitable candidate to match their needs.

Martin Buss, Executive Resourcing Partner at The Co-operative Group, provided the following feedback:

“Having met a small number of potential suppliers to assist us with our new Head of Client Contracts and Service role, we selected Green Park for several reasons. Firstly, having worked with Green Park previously, we were aware of their commitment to Inclusion and track record of producing Diverse shortlists, which is hugely important to our Co-op, but it was your ability to analyse our requirements, understand the critical skills and experience required and look beyond the usual target organisations that led us to our decision.

A tricky role, with numerous complexities, Green Park quickly produced a shortlist of qualified candidates for us to interview. Having completed the first round of interviews, it was clear that our requirements had iterated and the Green Park team pivoted instantly to produce a second, diverse shortlist of individuals that met our needs and ultimately enabled us to make an incredible hire.”

The candidate shared with us the following:

“I've worked with different recruiters during my career, but I can honestly say the experience I had with Green Park was exceptional. You had detailed knowledge on the new role Co-op had created and were clear on exactly what they were looking for - answering all the questions I had with absolute clarity. 

I felt updated every step of the way in terms of the process and the feedback after each round. I also felt well prepared heading into each interview as you provided detail on the nature of the interview and an overview of who the interviewer was. I also appreciated the simple but actually very practical advice I got from Green Park at each stage.”