How Oakstone Assisted Celebrus Hire a VP Global Services in 12 Weeks

Oakstone International partnered with Celebrus to appoint a VP Global Services, a critical leadership hire responsible for bringing greater structure, efficiency and strategic direction to a 50-person Professional Services and Managed Services organisation. Through targeted executive search and market mapping across MarTech, data and analytics, Oakstone identified a global services leader with experience spanning EMEA, APAC and international markets, alongside the cultural fit required for a growing technology business. Despite a highly specific brief and delays in stakeholder availability, the search was successfully completed in approximately 12 weeks, giving Celebrus an experienced executive capable of improving service delivery, reducing time to value and building a more scalable global services function.

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About Celebrus

For over 25 years, Celebrus has set the gold standard globally for improving marketing effectiveness and preventing fraud across all industries. They are laser-focused on improving the relationships between brands and consumers via better data. This means innovating better ways to manage digital identity and know your consumers, even when they’re not logged in. Celebrus provides frictionless data capture across all digital channels and devices, ensures compliance by design, and ultimately makes digital data instantly usable wherever required.

Search Background

Celebrus approached Oakstone International to support the search for a VP Global Services, a strategically important leadership hire designed to strengthen and develop the company’s services organisation as the business prepared for its next stage of growth.

Celebrus already had an established services function of approximately 50 people, spanning both Professional Services and Managed Services. However, as part of wider structural and succession planning, the business wanted to create clearer ownership of services as a discipline, with the new VP taking responsibility for the function and reporting directly into the CEO.

Celebrus was looking to hire an experienced services leader who could assess how the function operated, introduce greater repeatability and efficiency, reduce time to value for customers and create a structure capable of supporting the company’s future ambitions.

Celebrus selected Oakstone following research into the recruitment market, with Oakstone’s experience across MarTech, data and analytics particularly relevant. Our understanding of the competitive landscape, combined with experience recruiting for smaller and mid-sized technology businesses where cultural alignment is critical, helped establish the partnership.

Requirements

The brief required a seasoned and credible services executive who could lead experienced senior team members while bringing a new level of strategic direction to the wider function.

The successful candidate needed demonstrable experience improving services organisations, creating repeatable processes and building efficiencies around the delivery of complex technology solutions. They also needed the leadership maturity to manage established senior leaders across Professional Services and Managed Services, rather than relying on a heavily centralised or enterprise-level infrastructure around them.

Previous experience within MarTech was attractive, but Oakstone and Celebrus agreed that the search should extend into adjacent data and analytics businesses where candidates could offer relevant and transferable experience. Crucially, candidates needed experience operating within small to mid-sized organisations and an understanding of how to build and improve a function without the extensive resources available in a large enterprise environment.

Although the position was UK-based, Celebrus generates a significant proportion of its business internationally, particularly in the US. Candidates therefore needed at least EMEA-level leadership exposure and the ability to manage services across different markets, cultures and time zones, with previous global responsibility considered particularly valuable.

Why Oakstone?

Celebrus chose to partner with Oakstone International because of our established track record across the MarTech, data and analytics landscape, and our understanding of the types of businesses and leadership profiles relevant to their search. Rather than focusing solely on sector experience, Celebrus valued Oakstone’s knowledge of the competitive market and, importantly, our experience identifying senior talent from small and mid-sized technology companies. This understanding gave Celebrus confidence that Oakstone could assess candidates not only against their professional services experience, but also against the cultural and operational environment they would be joining.

Approach and Solutions

Oakstone developed a search strategy combining proactive market mapping with management of direct applicant that had were being generated internally for the position.

We mapped relevant organisations across MarTech, data and analytics, identifying experienced services leaders who matched both the functional requirements of the position and the type of environment Celebrus could offer. Alongside this targeted search, Oakstone reviewed approximately 100 direct applicants, filtering the considerable level of inbound interest against the specific requirements of the brief.

This was particularly valuable because Celebrus had an established HR capability but no dedicated specialist recruitment function. Rather than leaving the internal team to assess a large number of applications alongside its existing responsibilities, Oakstone provided the market knowledge and qualification required to identify which individuals genuinely had the relevant services leadership experience.

From the combined proactive search and inbound process, an initial shortlist of approximately seven candidates was created, with four progressing to interview. Oakstone continued researching the market throughout the process rather than stopping once interviews had begun, ensuring Celebrus retained strong market coverage and alternative options if circumstances changed.

Challenges

The principal challenge was balancing a relatively narrow leadership profile with a broad initial response to the vacancy. Although Celebrus had received approximately 100 direct applications, the majority did not meet the combination of seniority, services leadership, sector exposure and small-to-mid-sized company experience required.

The process also included a period in which the CEO was unavailable for approximately three weeks. For a senior appointment involving multiple executive stakeholders, a gap of this length could easily have resulted in candidates losing momentum or progressing elsewhere.

Oakstone maintained regular communication throughout the delay and continued market research in the background, ensuring Celebrus had additional coverage should timelines change or candidates withdraw. This allowed the business to manage the risk created by the delay without unnecessarily restarting or significantly broadening the search.

Search Results

Celebrus ultimately appointed a highly experienced services leader with a background spanning data and analytics and experience operating across EMEA, APAC and global roles. The successful candidate combined experience from larger corporate environments with time spent in small and mid-sized businesses, providing the cultural and operational alignment Celebrus had prioritised from the outset.

Importantly, the successful candidate brought both traditional professional services expertise and a more modern approach to services leadership. Their forward-thinking outlook, including an understanding of how AI could influence services practices, aligned strongly with the CEO’s vision for the future of the function.

The search was completed in approximately 12 weeks from project launch to placement, despite the interruption created by stakeholder availability. The result gave Celebrus an experienced global services leader capable of bringing Professional Services and Managed Services under stronger strategic leadership, improving efficiency and repeatability, and helping structure the function for its next stage of growth.

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