The hire you are worried about

The searches I get asked about tend to start the same way.

The last senior appointment did not work. Nobody wants to say so out loud. The business has lost a year.

Sometimes a generalist firm is sending resumes that read well and fall apart on the plant floor. Sometimes a founder cannot step back because there is nobody credible to step back to. Sometimes a sponsor is eighteen months from exit with a hole in the operating team.

Boards are not asking who can fill this fastest any more. They are asking what happens if this goes wrong.

Why food manufacturing is different

A strong FMCG commercial director is not automatically a strong food manufacturing commercial director. The gap does not show up in an interview.

Margins are thinner. A decision another sector would absorb shows up in your P&L inside a quarter. The customer is often a retailer with more leverage than you have. Volume gets committed before anyone knows whether the line will hold yield. And a BRCGS or SQF finding is not a compliance problem, it is a customer problem.

Someone who has run a site knows that. Someone who has advised on one knows the words for it. Both of them interview well. Only one of them is still there in a year.

What I screen for

Everyone you meet has already had a conversation with me.

I want to know what they actually changed, what it cost, what broke while they were doing it, and what they would do differently. I want to know if they have been through a failed audit, a recall, a delisting, or a line that would not hold yield. That is when you find out what someone is like.

I am also screening for fit with your business, not with the job title. Someone who does well in a founder-led business is often wrong for a sponsor-backed one. It works the other way round too.

What I will not do

I will not send a longer shortlist to look busy. If I am confident in two people, you meet two people.

I will not tell you a candidate is right when I think they are wrong, even when placing them would pay me.

And I will not take a search outside this sector. I spent the first years of this business saying yes to work I could do rather than work I should do. It built nothing.

Roles I run

Director to C-suite, across every function. Operations, supply chain, technical and quality, commercial, finance, engineering, procurement, HR, general management.

Sector and seniority are the screens, not function. I do not have a functional specialism and I do not need one. What I have is knowing how a food business actually works, from the inside first and then from this side of it.

How the search runs

I do every step myself, from the briefing to the first ninety days after the offer, because there is nobody else here. More about how I work.

Tell me what you are trying to hire

I will tell you straight whether I am the right person for it. Book a 30 minute call, or email scott@williams-recruitment.com.