Directorbank

DIRECTORBANK – REVIEW OF 2025:
Following a cautious start to 2025, Directorbank has observed a steady increase in demand for executive talent across the Private Equity space. While investors remain prudent, a shift towards optimism is emerging, with PE firms placing further emphasis on driving growth, efficiency and strategic alignment within their portfolio companies. Although deal volumes have yet to fully accelerate, the perception of assets as undervalued, combined with a gradual easing of inflation and interest rates, indicates a likely uptick in investment activity as the year progresses.

In terms of Executive Search, we’ve seen sustained demand for Chairs, NEDs, CEOs/MDs, and Sales & Marketing Directors. However, there has been a marked rise in the need for commercially minded CFOs and COOs reflecting an increased focus on financial agility, strategic foresight, and operational excellence at the Board level.

Sector-wise, performance within Industrials and Tech & Comms has remained strong, with Business Services also demonstrating resilience. Our German practice has also delivered excellent results, contributing a third of our overall business, and was once again recognised as a ‘top search consultant for Private Equity’ in WirtschaftesWoche’s annual survey.

In-house, we remain committed to enhancing our candidate database and leadership assessment capabilities to meet the evolving needs of our clients. This investment allows us to provide more effective, data-driven insights and highly relevant Board-level talent aligned to the growth, opportunities and challenges ahead.

Looking forward, our focus remains firmly on delivering high-quality, tailored Executive Search solutions for our Private Equity investor and Board clients. We also look forward to further building client relationships through our calendar of networking dinners, facilitating valuable connections between top-tier executives and investors.

Click here to view a summary of our activity and highlights.

Directorbank recognised as a top search firm in the ‘Private Equity’ category of the annual survey of Germany’s best search consultants.

We are very grateful and proud to announce that Directorbank has once again been recognised as a top search firm in the Private Equity category, as well as two specific industry categories, by German Business Magazine “WirtschaftsWoche” in its annual survey of Germany’s best search consultants. We are delighted by the news and would like to thank all our clients as well as our candidates for their ongoing trust in us and for the great teamwork we’ve shared.

For the year ahead we look forward to working with you all – clients both old and new – and will continue to work hard to source truly exceptional leaders with the skills, experience and characteristics to make a real impact on business performance.

Directorbank is excited to announce a new partnership with AssessioAI to bring science-backed, technology-driven leadership assessment to its clients.

AssessioAI, a pioneer in its field, helps to equip organisations with the clarity and confidence needed to make smarter decisions across hiring, succession planning and leadership development.

What does this mean for our clients?

In a nutshell, it helps them de-risk critical hiring decisions. As we well know, finding the right leadership talent is crucial to business success. By integrating Assessio’s cutting-edge tools into our search processes, we add an extra layer of value for our clients. The better the candidate data, the sharper the insight, and the greater the likelihood of a candidate thriving in the role, the team, and the organisation.

Directorbank’s Simon Thomas comments: “For our private equity, portfolio and other mid-market clients, the right leadership team is the most powerful driver of value creation. By partnering with Assessio, we bring greater confidence to key hiring decisions through a proven, science-backed, technology-driven approach to evaluating candidates. This allows us to go beyond the CV, interview and references to measure those deeper leadership capabilities, team dynamics, and ultimately the candidate’s ability to deliver real impact in the role.”

AssessioAI combines decades of validated psychometrics with cutting-edge technology and business context, to dive into the deeper level characteristics and motivations of candidates. And, by bringing together multiple streams of intelligence – from assessment results and human judgment to CV content and interview feedback – Directorbank can present a more holistic view of the candidate and a more precise understanding of whether their competencies and values align with the needs and ambitions of the hiring organisation.

Our clients will benefit from:

A more structured, consistent interview process:
Assessio’s scorecard system is based on extensive research into the competencies and behaviours of high performing individuals. Incorporating this into the interview process brings improved focus, consistency and fairness.

A much deeper understanding of candidates:
Grounded in 70 years of proven psychometrics, Assessio leverages cutting-edge science, data and AI technology to translate diverse candidate data into clear, contextual insights that clients can trust.

Support in building high performing teams:
Assessio assesses and compares members of the leadership team to bring deeper understanding of team dynamics, strengths and risks. This helps drive growth by shaping collaboration, aligning values, overcoming challenge, and elevating performance.

Alo Arro, CEO of AssessioAI, comments: “After careful research and analysis of several leadership assessment tools, we are delighted Directorbank has chosen AssessioAI. This reflects their commitment to innovation and reinforces their position as a trusted search partner to their private equity and other entrepreneurial clients seeking to recruit ‘best fit’ industry experts, build high-performing leadership teams, and deliver ambitious growth targets.”

For more information, please email Simon Thomas, Director at s.thomas@directorbank.com, or Jo Clasper, Head of Research at j.clasper@directorbank.com

MID-YEAR REVIEW OF ACTIVITY:
Following a slow start, 2025 is now turning out to be a very positive year for the Directorbank team.

As reported in our January commentary, we noticed a softening of the market in the last quarter of 2024, possibly reflecting a cautious reaction both to the UK Budget and the outcome of the USA election. This continued until Easter 2025, since when there has been a marked strengthening in demand in the Mid-Market. Based on our current pipeline of retained projects we expect this to continue well into October/November; we do not know if this will sustain depending on the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement together with the potential impact of wider international economic uncertainties. Nevertheless, while UK assets continue to be seen as undervalued, there is room for cautious optimism, particularly if interest rates and inflation reduce further.

In terms of Executive Search activity, we are experiencing normal demand for CEOs/MDs, CFOs and Chairs and much stronger demand for COOs and Sales & Marketing Directors. We are also seeing a steep rise in non-recruitment services. We have devoted considerable time to improving the quality of our database over the last two years and it is very heartening to see our clients now exploiting this together with our wider market intelligence.

At the sector level we are seeing good performance in the mainstream Industrial sector while Technology and Business Services are both holding up well. Our German Practice continues to perform excellently and continues to contribute a third of our overall business.

As a leading search partner of mid-market Private Equity investors for portfolio Board positions in the UK and DACH, we entered 2025 with a clear priority: to support ambitious businesses at every stage of their journey through the identification of the best human capital talent available. As always, we remain focused on assignment delivery for our clients and look forward to hosting our usual programme of events for our PE investor clients and Board-level candidates throughout the remainder of 2025.

Click on the following link to view a summary of our 2024 activity and highlights: