Victim Support Scotland

The Company

Victim Support Scotland (VSS) is a leading charity dedicated to supporting individuals affected by crime across the country.

Offering independent, free, and confidential services, they assist victims, witnesses, and their families, providing tailored support to meet individual needs.

The charity offers practical help, emotional support, and guidance through the criminal justice system, with specialized services for those impacted by serious crimes such as murder, terrorism, rape, domestic violence, and hate crime.

With dedicated volunteers and staff in local and national offices, including teams in courts, Victim Support Scotland advocates for victims’ rights and works to influence national policies and improve support services within the criminal justice system.

The Challenge

VSS are growing as they provide support and advice to more people across Scotland. But they want to bring in the very best as part of their leadership team to ensure the quality of their service.

They were looking to recruit four senior roles into their team, but wanted one to partner with a single consultancy to ensure consistency across the processes for all four roles, including a truly robust process.

The Process

Our Executive Search Team lead, Sarah Gracie, met with the Victim Support Scotland’s HR Director to understand the organisations, the challenges and the successes they were experiencing and to fully comprehend the requirements and nuances of each role.

This allowed us to map out a recruitment plan that was bespoke to the needs of Victim Support Scotland, and agree the process with the team.

Sarah briefed the marketing team to create a recruitment campaign that included targeted advertising and direct marketing outreach driving an audience to a bespoke landing page where applicants could get an overview of the organisation, get to know and understand VSS’s culture and get some background on each of the roles before applying.

Success

Across all four positions there were in excess of 300 candidates who contacted Eden Scott about the roles.

Upon submitting a CV and supporting statement from each of the interested candidates, screening interviews took place with Sarah at Eden Scott.

This produced a long list of 10-12 candidates per role which were sent to VSS and from that five candidates per role were taken to panel interview.

All four positions were successfully recruited for, within the timescales that had been agreed, and the feedback from all candidates was extremely positive.

A key part of our process at Eden Scott is that all candidates who were interviewed should be given constructive feedback, and this process was followed through for those applying for Victim Support Scotland.