New Chief Executive Appointment- EPIC Housing

EPIC stands for Empowering People Inspiring Communities.  They currently own just under 1,400 properties and work closely with three local authorities together with a range of partners to ensure their homes help to meet the needs of local people in Stoke on Trent, Newcastle under Lyme, and Staffordshire Moorlands.   

EPIC was downgraded to G3/V2 and subsequently parted with their executive team.   They were on a recovery and improvement path when we were engaged to advise on and benchmark their proposed new Executive Structure and then recruit their new permanent CEO to continue that journey, to modernize its practices and excel in providing customer-centric services to their residents.  

Greenacre pulled a Project Team together and met with the interim CEO, Company Secretary and Chair of the Board to discuss the requirements of the role, the environment and future recovery strategy.  Based on this information, we co-designed an appropriate campaign in order to attract the right talent to the role.  We agreed to be very frank and honest about the chaotic nature of the organisation to ensure any future applicants were comfortable with the challenge at hand.  As a community centric organisation, it was also critical that this was clear from all the associated content (advert, recruitment pack etc), as well as ensuring there was some tenant involvement in the final assessment day.

The advertising campaign was posted on local and national job boards as well as being shared extensively on all social channels to ensure wide reach, but also a local presence was achieved.  We also used a number of specialist job boards including WISH (Women in Social Housing), Disability Jobs, BAME jobs and LGBTQ jobs as they were keen to ensure as diverse a shortlist as possible.

We invite all applicants to have an initial conversation with our Recruitment Director to discuss any specific requirements throughout the process (visually impaired, accessibility etc) so we can ensure this is accommodated from the outset.

This was supplemented by a very pro-active Search & Selection process throughout our network both locally and nationally.  When building out our longlist, we were deliberate in approaching under-represented groups to ensure we had a diverse longlist to present to the interim CEO and Board Chair.