Principal - Not for Profit ​/ Education ​/ Healthcare

Principal Consultant, Not for Profit or Healthcare or Education Practice

Are you ready to run your own mandates at C-suite level?

Do you want to build a career in retained search, not just support someone else's?

Are you looking for a firm that will back your ambition with the platform to match?

Compass Carter Osborne is the industry’s highest profile provider or board level executive search within independent health and care services. Part of Compass Recruitment Solutions (CRS), a market-leading recruitment business focused on the Health, Care, Education, and Life Sciences sectors.

We are a founder-led and investor backed, with a values-driven company culture where ambition, collaboration, and a sense of fun are at the heart of everything we do. Our teams are encouraged to thrive, achieve their full potential, and enjoy the journey along the way.

As an award-winning Executive Search provider (Health Investor Search Firm of the Year, 2022, 2024 and 2026), we are the go-to partner for critical C-suite and senior-level hiring. Our clients include leading care providers, private equity investors (and their portfolio companies), and high-net-worth individuals who trust us to find the very best talent for their businesses.

Due to continued growth and success, we are seeking a Principal Consultant to join our Healthcare, Education or Not for Profit practice in our London office. This is an outstanding opportunity for an ambitious search professional ready to take their next step, whether that’s moving from a research or 180 delivery role into a full-cycle billing desk, or joining a specialist, market-leading firm where you can build a genuine career in retained executive search.

If you are a Senior Researcher, Associate Consultant or 180 Consultant at a larger search firm and you know you are capable of more, more client exposure, more ownership, more reward, this role has been designed for you. Equally, if you are already operating in a full 360 or Principal-level capacity but feel your current firm isn’t giving you the platform, the sector specialism, or the quality of mandates to match your ambition, we would like to hear from you.

At CCO, you won’t be left to figure it out alone. You will work alongside Partners and Directors who have built some of the most recognised careers in executive search, on mandates that genuinely shape the leadership of PE-backed and privately-owned non profit organisations. The structure here is built to develop you, from your first retained mandate through to Director and beyond.

The successful candidate will focus on one of 3 sectors, continuing their journey to become one of the most trusted search professionals in their specialised sector. With this in mind, you can see our priorities within each sector below.

Our Health and Social care services practice is CCO’s flagship vertical. We work across the full spectrum of investor-backed healthcare, primary and secondary care, adult social care, senior living, consumer health, and health and wellness, placing CEO, CFO, COO and board-level leadership into businesses backed by private equity, family offices, and high-net-worth investors.

Our Education practice focuses on the private and specialist education sector, K12 independent schools, private school groups, specialist SEND providers, and PE-backed education platforms. We place CEO, CFO, COO, Managing Director, and board-level leadership into businesses where education meets commercial ambition, organisations backed by private equity, family offices, and institutional investors who expect their leadership teams to deliver both outstanding outcomes and commercial performance.

Our Not-for-Profit practice sits deliberately outside the traditional public-sector charity space. We work with commercially-minded not-for-profits, organisations with sophisticated governance, hybrid revenue models, corporate funding, and boards that expect their leadership hires to be held to the same commercial standard as their portfolio-company counterparts. This focuses on trading subsidiaries, membership bodies with commercial arms, PE-backed social impact platforms, and the…