Tues, 14 Feb 2012

Interim and executive search firm Archer Mathieson and interim management provider BIE Interim Executive are to merge in April.

The as yet unnamed new company will be lead by current BIE chief executive Rob Walker, while Archer Mathieson chief executive Richard Wright will leave the position in April, with Cornhill due to make an announcement shortly about another opportunity he will be taking up later this year.

The two companies are currently separate entities within The Cornhill Partnership,

The search practice will continue to follow Archer Mathieson’s ‘multi-specialist’ approach, covering finance, human resources and supply-chain/logistics.

Walker says: “Markets are never static and, as two organisations that help clients achieve their own change and transformation agendas, we too must adapt and change.”

He goes on to say that the decision to merge had various motivations, including ending “the overlap from a client perspective”, allowing clients “access to more services under one roof and a wider, deeper, higher-quality talent pool than before”, as well as creating a new company with “the critical mass to grow and to do that faster than we could separately”.

Richard Smelt, non-executive director at Hays and former group HR director at Northern Rock comments: “The gap between search and interim has narrowed over recent years; organisations see interim increasingly as a very credible way of resourcing. It makes complete sense to bring these two offerings together within one brand.”