Tapping into sporting talent

Staffing businesses are tapping into a growing market for high-performing sports people. Rob Steed of Laps.
Sat, 1 October 2016 | By Colin Cottell

FROM OCTOBER'S RECRUITER MAGAZINE

Staffing businesses are tapping into a growing market for high-performing sports people. 

Rob Steed (right) of Laps.Careers (Life After Professional Sport), which is due to launch a job board as part of an online platform providing career advice for sports people in early October, told Recruiter: “I was being asked by a lot of clients if we could recruit sports people for them.”

Typically, he said, “clients who asked were those looking for sales people, project managers, as well as people for quite physically and mentally tiring roles, like stock broking and financial trading, where you need to be resilient and used to hard knocks”.

Steed estimates that the number of professional sports people, either currently in sport, or who have left it recently, is about 100,000. “It’s not a massive market,” he said, “but it is one that is constantly evolving.”

Steed said employers are attracted by the traits that make top sports people successful, including drive and determination, resilience and the ability to be coached, in the belief that these will translate into high performance in business. According to research by professional services firm EY, 94% of female C-suite executives played sport.

Olympian hockey player James Tindall, who represented Team GB at both the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and the 2012 London Olympics, and is now a director at finance and project management recruiter, Ad Idem Consulting, said companies “are very keen to hire these people” not only because of traits such as competiveness and transferable skills, but because they offer good PR opportunities.  

Among elite sports people who have forged completely different careers after retiring are Paralympian equestrian Sophie Christiansen, who went into computer programming, and former Durham cricketer Mark Turner, who now works in medical sales. Others such as Robert Parker, Team GB water polo player at the London 2012 Olympics, work in recruitment. 

Steed’s business partner is Exeter City footballer Robbie Simpson.

Ex-Wales Rugby Union player Andy Moore, co-founder of Athlete Career Transition (ACT), said his company recently placed eight Olympians into international professional services firm EY on six-month placements, including Team GB Olympian rower Olivia Carnegie-Brown. “We make the contact with the corporate and create the opportunity with them because most big companies don’t really have any experience in bringing in ex-professional athletes. We help them put the processes in place, then we go and get the athlete,” Moore said. “It is much easier to create the desire for the role rather than shoehorn a particular person into a particular role,” he added.  

Demand for those from an elite sports background is not confined to big corporates. “It is feasible for SMEs to employ top-level sports people,” said Moore, citing start-up foreign exchange firm OSTC, which hired ex-England cricketer Matthew Hoggard, and ex-Wales rugby internationals Dafydd James and Huw Bennett.

Moore said ACT targets certain types of candidates from the world of professional sport: “Those we can fast-track into business, those who have had their career ended by injury or whose contracts were ended, and those who have gone into the wrong career.” 

With the recent EY appointments, ACT worked with Saville Consulting who provided psychometric testing, while video interviewing was also used to provide a shortlist of applicants. Moore said the number of candidates with a high-performance sports background is a sizeable one. With 10,000 Olympians competing in Rio alone, Moore estimates that 30-40% will need a job after the games end. Ex-US NFL players are also an untapped market that the company is eyeing, he added.

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