Ten industry specialists placed for a Saudi sovereign-backed industrial development programme within 30 days.

The mandate

A Saudi sovereign-backed industrial development fund engaged JOH Partners in early 2021 to build a specialist programme team of ten senior practitioners across ten distinct technical and commercial disciplines. The programme was anchored to the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 industrial agenda, with the fund administering capital deployment and advisory capacity across priority sectors including renewable energy, advanced manufacturing, water technology, logistics infrastructure and industrial finance.

The mandate was unusual in both its scope and its timeline. Ten concurrent searches, each requiring a different specialist profile, with a target of full team in seat within three months. The programme director had been in post for six weeks and had a fixed board presentation date by which personnel depth had to be demonstrated.

Speed without quality sacrifice was the explicit brief. Each role needed to be sourced, assessed and presented to a panel of fund principals and sector experts before any offer could proceed. The fund reported directly to the Ministry; there was no room for a misplaced appointment.

Our approach

The mandate ran across four compressed phases, all ten roles in parallel.

01. Role architecture sprint

Before any candidate work began, we ran three two-hour working sessions with the programme director and four sector advisers to produce a single-page brief for each of the ten roles. Each brief captured the technical depth required, the internal adjacencies the candidate would need to navigate, and the seniority at which they would need to operate alongside ministry and fund board counterparts. At the end of the sprint, all ten role architectures were signed off by the programme director.

02. Parallel market mapping

Ten simultaneous market maps ran over the first two weeks, each led by a dedicated analyst against the relevant role architecture brief. We identified 327 candidates across all ten roles through primary research, not database pulls, covering GCC-based practitioners, Saudi nationals in international roles who might repatriate, and international technical specialists with verifiable Gulf market experience.

03. Rapid screen and prioritise

From the 327 mapped candidates, we ran structured telephone screens with 186 over ten days. Seventy-three passed the structured screen. Thirty-two were presented to the programme director with full assessment notes. The fund’s panel reviewed all thirty-two and selected a shortlist of three to five candidates per role for in-depth assessment.

04. Parallel assessment and close

All ten final-round processes ran concurrently. We facilitated twelve panel assessment sessions over fourteen days at the fund’s Riyadh offices. Offer papers for all ten appointments were issued within the same week; all ten candidates accepted within five business days.

The programme: ten specialist roles

The talent market intelligence in the section below covers the Renewable Energy Specialist role, which was representative of the programme’s search profile. The full programme comprised ten concurrent searches across the following disciplines.

1. Renewable Energy Specialist
2. Advanced Manufacturing Specialist
3. Water Technology Adviser
4. Logistics Infrastructure Lead
5. Industrial Finance Specialist
6. Digital Transformation Lead
7. Petrochemicals Programme Manager
8. Mining and Minerals Adviser
9. Agri-Industrial Specialist
10. Strategic Partnerships Director

The outcome

All ten appointments were in seat within 32 days of the first role architecture session, two days beyond the programme director’s internal target and two weeks ahead of the fund’s board presentation date. The full cohort remained in seat at the 24-month review, making this one of the highest-retention cohort placements in JOH Partners’ history.

Three of the placed specialists have since moved into senior fund leadership roles. Two have been seconded to Vision 2030 programme boards as technical advisers. The mandate established JOH Partners as the fund’s primary executive search partner for two subsequent cohort builds in 2022 and 2023.

The team

The mandate was led by the partner heading our Group Holdings practice, supported by a research director and a four-analyst market mapping unit. Given the ten concurrent searches, the pod operated at full capacity across the four-week active period: approximately 520 partner-hours and 1,400 analyst-hours in total. The delivery PM coordinated scheduling for the twelve panel assessment sessions and all ten offer processes running in parallel.

We needed ten specialists placed inside a month. JOH Partners gave us three candidates per role, every role, on the same day, and every candidate they showed us was real. That is not how search usually works.