Partner​/Director - Not Profit

Do you have the experience and the motivation to build a Not-for-Profit practice?

Do you want the backing of an award-winning group and the PE-invested client base to match?

Are you Interested in supporting global expansion of an executive search firm where your ambition sets the pace?

Compass Carter Osborne is the industry’s highest-profile provider of 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 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, 2026 and Recruitment Firm of the Year, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024), 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.

We are looking for a Partner or Director-level operator who has built something, a practice, a book, a reputation, in retained C-suite search across the commercial not-for-profit space. Whether you are already running a practice at a boutique or global search firm, or you are a Director or experienced Consultant ready to take the step into leading and developing your own practice, we would like to hear from you.

For those making the step up, this is a genuine opportunity to build a practice inside a firm that will back you with platform, brand and infrastructure, not one that will slot you into someone else’s model. For Senior / Principal consultants, this will give you a defined pathway to Partner through the Director progression path.

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 growing category of not-for-profits being run like businesses.

This isn’t a standard operating role. It is the mandate, and the platform, to build a practice from a defined starting point into a market-leading position.

Reporting to the founding Partners, Adam Carter and Luke Osborne, the Partner will own:

• Personal fee production on senior retained C-suite mandates, CEO, CFO, COO, Chair and Trustee-level appointments across the commercial not-for-profit space
• End-to-end mandate delivery – from client briefing and search strategy through to shortlist, offer and placement
• Client relationship ownership – building deep, long-term partnerships with a portfolio of NfP clients, and being the point of contact they trust for their most senior hires
• Practice ownership
  , building the Not-for-Profit vertical, its client base, its brand and its market position
• Team build-out
  , hiring, mentoring and leading the consultants and researchers who will scale the practice with you
• Client strategy
  , long-term partnerships with PE-backed and privately-owned NfPs, membership bodies, commercial subsidiaries of large charities, and organisations sitting at the interface between mission and margin
• Commercial…