From Talent Scarcity to Five Senior Hires for AbinBev, a $59bn-a-year Global Brewer.
DRINKS MANUFACTURING & OPERATIONS
The Impact
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5senior
Leadership hires delivered in 9 months
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10days
Working days from brief to presenting a shortlist
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4
Countries - placements delivered across AbinBev's global footprint
Roles Placed
- Brewery Director
- Quality Compliance Director
- HSE Director
- Zone Reliability Director
The client
Our client is one of the world’s largest brewers, selling beer brands in 150+ countries with $59bn+ in annual revenue.
Despite its scale, the business moves fast and hires for culture as much as capability. Every employee, from shop floor to senior leadership, is expected to act like an owner. That combination made senior hiring difficult: candidates from other large organisations didn’t necessarily bring the pace or accountability the culture demanded.
The search began with a difficult vacancy at one of the client’s flagship European breweries, in a market where specialist health, safety and environment talent runs thin and where previous search partners hadn’t been able to reach the passive candidates who could actually do the job.
The Challenge
The market for health, safety and environment specialists in Belgium is extremely tight, and passive candidates don’t respond to inbound messages – reaching them meant proactive headhunting, not posting and waiting. The site’s language requirements, Dutch and English, ruled out half the country’s candidate pool at a stroke, and Belgium’s unusually strict, locally specific safety regulations meant even Dutch-speaking candidates from neighbouring markets weren’t automatically transferable.
Covering the ground took a three-person research team working local, national and relocating candidate pools in parallel.
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Sourcing HSE specialists in one of Europe's thinnest talent markets
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Working within a strict, bilingual, regulation-specific candidate pool
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Reaching passive candidates, no other recruiter had contacted
It reflects how strong a partner Nexus has been in ABI’s journey to strengthen our Supply Chain team. Since the start, the Nexus team has lived up to the agreements made, consistently provided strong profiles, shown flexibility where required, and, in a short amount of time, developed a very strong understanding of the ABI culture. I value our partnership a lot and look forward to exploring a new domain together.
People Director Supply Chain
