LIVERPOOL CITY COUNCIL - CASE STUDY

THE BRIEF

Liverpool is one of the fastest-growing local government areas in New South Wales, with a development trajectory extending to 2050. To match that ambition, the CEO set out

to establish a new function reporting directly to him: the Office of the CEO, comprising four senior leadership roles responsible for strategic portfolio delivery, major projects,

and the organisational reform required to deliver for a growing city.



This was not four vacancies. It was a single organisational design problem with four interlocking mandates, to be filled concurrently, at pace, and to a standard the council

could defend to its community and its Councillors.

WHY THIS WAS DIFFERENT

Most executive recruitment would have run four separate searches. We treated the Office of the CEO as one coherent function and built a single, integrated attraction and

assessment strategy around it. That distinction mattered. The four roles had to work as a team from day one, which meant assessing not only individual capability but how

each appointment complemented the others and the CEO’s own leadership.

OUR APPROACH

We began with the structure, not the advertisement. Working directly with the CEO, we defined the purpose of each role, its accountabilities, and the capability profile

required, then mapped how the four roles would function together as a leadership unit.

Attraction was built to reach beyond the usual local government circuit. We wanted candidates who could bring delivery discipline from wherever it existed: state government, utilities, infrastructure, and the private sector. To carry the ambition of the roles authentically, we worked with the CEO to record a dedicated video for each position. In his own words, he set out what the role would deliver for Liverpool, the environment the appointee would operate in, and the standard expected. Those videos anchored bespoke candidate brochures and ran across the campaign’s digital channels, giving prospective candidates something no position description can: the principal’s own account of the opportunity, directly.

Selection was evidence-led throughout. Each candidate was assessed against a defined competency model, supported by psychometric assessment, so that the

recommendation to the CEO rested on structured evidence rather than impression. For a new function under direct CEO oversight, that rigour was not a refinement. It was

the point.

THE OUTCOME

Each of the four roles attracted more than 80 applications, drawn from both the government and private sectors. Around 40 per cent of that field was generated through

direct search. All four successful candidates were secured through targeted headhunting: the campaign built the depth, the search discipline secured the calibre.

The appointees were drawn deliberately from across sectors: one from local government, one from a water utility, one from state government, and one from the private sector.

The result is a leadership team that brings genuinely diverse delivery experience to the Office of the CEO, rather than a single sector view.

WHY IT MATTERS

Standing up a new executive function reporting to the CEO is a high-visibility, high-accountability undertaking. It is exactly the kind of work where process integrity is not

optional. This engagement demonstrates what we mean by search delivered differently: organisational design before advertising, an attraction strategy built to reach beyond

the obvious field, and an evidence-based selection process a council can stand behind.

TESTIMONIALS