Ross Hoare

Ross Hoare

Director

As Hyperion’s Director of Delivery, I support our core practices on the delivery of critical mandates for our clients. I joined the business in 2015 and have shaped our delivery processes, ensuring our clients and candidates received the best possible experience. I have worked with start-ups, scale-ups and corporates across Europe and the US recruiting in renewables, energy storage, future mobility and emerging climate technologies.

Prior to joining Hyperion, I spent nearly five years as Head of Project Resources for a renewable energy installation business. We specialised in solar PV but also installed small-scale wind turbines and renewable heating technologies. This gave me a fantastic grounding in many of the technology areas that we work in currently and cemented my passion for the wider cleantech sector.

I’m lucky to have two amazing boys who always make me smile and keep me very busy. I love spending time outside as a family and holidays in Cornwall. Knowing that my work in the cleantech sector will contribute towards making the world a better place for us, my children and future generations is my biggest inspiration.

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20 April 2026

Elevating Your Search Partner to a Talent Business Partner

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The value of having the right search partner for your business is enormous. A search partner brings a rigorous, research-driven and consultative approach. They proactively map the market, build longlists from deep industry networks and approach high-calibre passive candidates who are not actively seeking new roles. They understand the talent landscape you’re competing in. 

Where even greater value comes, is elevating this relationship to becoming a talent business partner. This is a true trusted advisor relationship to senior executives and boards. This goes beyond hiring individual roles in a transactional relationship, it’s about offering true market intelligence, benchmarking and talent services. 

Of course, this doesn’t happen overnight. Trust is earned. Often over many years. Only after a search firm has really proven their value can the relationship deepen. 

This can mean sharing privileged information with your search firm in order for them to be best placed to support the business. Providing advanced oversight of organisational changes impacting talent requirements can help enormously with creating smooth hiring processes. 

A long-term client of ours recently provided advanced notification of some significant organisational changes in the business which would then create specific hiring needs. This gave us the chance to conduct advanced research and talent pooling. As soon as the business was ready to proceed with the search, we had a huge headstart, dramatically reducing our time to provide a candidate shortlist.  

Partnering together over many years streamlines each search. Your talent business partner knows your company inside out, knows how to best assess candidate’s cultural fit. They know the types of individuals that can be successful in the business.

Your talent business partner knows how to best sell your company to passive A players so that they are intrigued and engage.

Over and above a core search service, your talent business partner can add additional value through a range of talent intelligence services such as talent pipelining and succession planning, competitor talent mapping and analysis, and compensation and equity benchmarking.

Prior to commencing a board search last year, we conducted a compensation and equity benchmarking exercise for our client, where we mapped out the compensation packages for Chairs and NEDs in VC backed businesses at similar stages. This gave greater clarity for our client on how best to structure a competitive compensation package with the right mix of retainer plus equity. 

For other long-term clients, we’ve advised senior leadership teams and boards on international talent landscapes in advance of overseas expansion decisions. Having recruited in 19 countries, we were able to use our knowledge of different markets to provide key talent insights to aid their business planning. 

Elevating your search partner to a talent business partner relationship is based on trust and value provided, and it takes time. However, the time investment that goes into this relationship can be repaid exponentially in added value to your business.

 

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#talent#executivesearch

12 January 2026

The Importance of a Well-Constructed Interview Process

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Once you’ve made the decision to proceed with a senior hire into your business and engaged with a specialist search firm, if you haven’t already, it’s time to map out your interview process.  

This is often neglected, with the interview process being made up on the fly. With over a decade’s experience managing senior level searches, I can say this rarely makes for a smooth process. Real consideration is required as to what you need to get out of the interview process, in order to give you the confidence to make a candidate a job offer. 

What are the most important things you need to find out from a candidate, and who is best placed in your organisation to obtain this information? Which members of your Exec leadership team need to be involved? Will your investors want the opportunity to interview candidates?  

What are you looking to achieve with each interview stage? Each stage should have a clear purpose, rather than merely getting multiple people to cover the same topics with the candidate. Decide who will be assessing different competencies. Everyone involved in the interview process should have a specific objective. 

Complete interview panel alignment is non-negotiable for senior executive hiring. We saw a C-level search fail when an interviewer, a direct report who felt threatened by the candidate’s incoming position, successfully derailed the process, creating a very poor candidate experience. Managing internal stakeholder dynamics early in the process is vital. 

Having a very clear process mapped out from the start and being able to communicate this with candidates, creates a more positive experience and impression of your business. It demonstrates your company is organised and that you’re taking this process seriously.   

We would recommend no more than three interview stages.  

Too often we have seen an ad hoc interview process with too many stages, end unsuccessfully. Candidates can get frustrated when new stages keep getting added, increasing the chance of losing great candidates to competitors who move faster and who are more decisive. We recently had a client that insisted on a seven-stage interview process with multiple stakeholders over the course of a couple of months. This was against our advice and subsequently resulted in their chosen candidate accepting an alternative offer. Time kills deals. 

It’s important to keep up the momentum in an interview process; to keep candidates fully engaged and motivated, to reduce the risk of them accepting other offers and to stop their enthusiasm from dwindling. When candidates have been shortlisted, work with your key hiring stakeholders to block out diaries and map the process out. You want to avoid weeks between different stages. You want this process to be as tight as possible to give you the best chance of a successful outcome. Unfortunately, we’ve seen many processes fail due to the interview process dragging on for months. Equally, I’ve seen slick interview processes that cut weeks off client’s time to hire, bringing forward the positive impact a new senior leadership hire can have on their business.  

One final tip, interviews are two-way processes. Remember to sell the opportunity of working for your business as well as deciding whether a candidate is the right fit for you. The last thing you want is to make a candidate an offer which is turned down because you missed the opportunity to sell your business and the role. Even in soft markets, top talent is always in demand, and always has options. 

Ross Hoare 

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#talent#HR

14 October 2025

The Most Important Part of a Search Process - The Kick-Off Meeting

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This is my most enjoyable part of a search process. I know if we get this right, the rest of the search process is so much easier, faster, and we’ll nail the search. If you are investing money in a search process for a critical business hire, it’s also essential that you invest the appropriate time with your search partner at the start of the process, as we call it, the Kick-Off meeting, to ensure the best chance of success. 

The kick-off meeting, or assignment briefing meeting, is essential to an effective search process. It covers a lot of ground, but good candidates, the passive ones not searching for a job, ask these questions. Us knowing the answers reflects well on us both, and makes for a positive impression and momentum. This meeting covers: 

  • The background and culture of the business 

  • The background on why the role is open 

  • A thorough understanding of the role – alignment on the job description 

  • What impact will this role have on the business. What is the opportunity for the candidate? 

  • A thorough understanding of the person profile required for the role 

  • Full details of the remuneration package 

  • Agreement on the search process: timescales, how the client likes to be updated on progress, interview process, decision making process, key stakeholders involved, any confidentiality considerations.  

There’s a lot of information to cover, especially if this is the first time working together. This is an opportunity for your search partner to really get under the skin of the business. For us this is typically a 90 minute meeting or call. It’s the best investment you’ll make. 

Don’t gloss over the details. 

This is a chance to be very specific about topics like culture, mindset, values, expectations, tasks, team and compensation. Also defining the interview and decision-making process, who is involved, at what stage and when. The importance of this is a whole article in itself. On the kick-off meeting you can make sure there’s full alignment and no grey areas when it comes to expectations and what it is exactly that you are looking for and why. No one wants surprises at the end of a process. 

Your chosen search partner is representing your business in the market. Choose your partner wisely, you need to ensure that they are able to talk knowledgably and confidently about your business and the markets you’re in. The majority of the time they will be approaching passive candidates, those not actively looking to change roles. You need to be sure that they are best equipped to ‘sell’ the opportunity of joining your business. First impressions count a lot when it comes to attracting great talent, and you often only get one shot to convince a candidate that your opportunity is worth exploring.   

The investment of time at the start of the search can save weeks during the process. It ensures your search partner is searching in the right places, speaking with the right people, conveying the right messages, qualifying against the right criteria, and creating a smooth process with no surprises. Because as previously said in business and in hiring, no one likes surprises. 

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#talent#cleantech