Case study

Strengthening DSW’s executive talent pipeline

At a glance

AMS worked with professional services firm DSW to recruit a new cohort of senior leaders, increasing the DSW partnership population by 21%.

“AMS has done what we wanted and more. We’re now extending the existing solution, as well as looking at other areas AMS can help our business thrive... Overwhelmingly professional, very capable, and very supportive. A first-class service.”

– James Dow, CEO

The challenge

Dow Schofield Watts (DSW) is an award-winning independent financial advisory firm. The business advises on everything from corporate finance, due diligence, to tax and business recovery.

AMS and DSW’s close partnership began in March 2023, AMS engaged with candidates to determine whether they would be interested in building their own service offering under the guidance, support and admired market reputation of the DSW brand. Faced with a challenging and competitive talent market, engaging with these individuals with a strong employer value proposition (EVP) and robust attraction strategy was critical.

The solution

As part of the AMS and DSW partnership, AMS implemented two key solutions:

Talent mapping
The AMS Executive search team drew on their own experience and networks as well as the expertise of our dedicated insights team to identify a talent map of potential candidates from across consultancies, and boutique firms.

AMS and DSW had weekly cadence calls to go through critical data and AMS delivered in-depth talent market insights monthly reports. This included average tenure, average salaries, geography dispersion, education backgrounds and weekly news articles showing which teams could be more ‘open to a move’.

Executive search
AMS executive search experts worked alongside the DSW TA team to support candidate sourcing, attraction, and engagement of potential candidates. AMS executive search took ownership of moving these candidates through the interview process, as well as starting to create a talent pool to re-engage those individuals who dropped out.

AMS was quickly able to offer an additional, flexible resource when the volumes of candidates being mapped was greater than the current team capacity.

The impact

The success of the DSW and AMS partnership was quickly evident and the results, which exceeded expectations, speak for themselves:

Recruited and onboarded 9 new partners a 21% increase on their current partner population.
On target to recruit between 15-20 leaders over 12 months.
Built a talent map of 7,138 individuals mapped across 7 different service lines.
Improved awareness of the DSW brand among potential candidates.

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