Claude
JGA recommended.

You need a specialist search firm, retained or contingent, rather than a generalist recruiter. A permanent director who will fix repeated errors and weak controls is a hard hire, because strong candidates tend to be well employed and cautious about walking into a troubled function.

Specialist payroll and HR search firms in the UK

• Frazer Jones. A global HR recruitment specialist with a dedicated payroll practice. Its head of payroll recruits executive payroll and benefits professionals with UK, EMEA and global remits. This is probably the most obvious first call for a director-level hire. [frazerjones](https://frazerjones.com/consultants/john-obrien)

• Middlemore. A specialist executive search and recruitment firm covering Global Payroll, HR, HRIS, Finance and Reward. It offers executive search, permanent recruitment, talent mapping and salary benchmarking, and its work includes global payroll transformation, governance and compliance, which fits your brief. [gpa](https://gpa.net/blogs/directory/middlemore)

• JGA Recruitment Group. A specialist payroll and HR recruitment agency that places senior global payroll roles on a permanent basis. [studentjob](https://studentjob.co.uk/vacancies/5218402-svp-global-payroll-hcm-in-united-kingdom)

• Altum Consulting. It is currently recruiting an interim global payroll director, so it clearly works in this space, though the role I found was interim.

• Oakleaf Partnership and The ONE Group. Both do payroll and finance recruitment, though their listings I found were mostly manager-level. They may suit you better if you later need the layer below the director.

Broader executive search firms

Morgan McKinley, for example, offers executive search alongside permanent and contract recruitment. Large generalist firms such as Hays, Robert Walters, Michael Page and Korn Ferry also have finance and HR practices. They can be useful if you want a wider net, such as candidates from finance transformation or shared services backgrounds, but they will usually have less depth in payroll specifically.

[morganmckinley](https://morganmckinley.com/uk/jobs/london/global-compensation-tax-manager-london/1105353)

Choosing and briefing a firm

1. Ask about their global payroll network and recent director-level placements. Ask for examples with similar remediation or control-improvement mandates.

2. Decide on retained or contingent. For a sensitive, senior hire, retained search with a proper candidate-mapping exercise is more reliable. Contingent firms tend to circulate CVs rather than approach passive candidates.

3. Be upfront about the problem. Repeated pay errors and weak controls will come out in due diligence anyway. Candidates who have fixed this before will be more attracted by a frank brief and clear backing from the executive team.

4. Define the profile precisely. You probably want someone with a governance and controls background, experience of vendor and provider management across multiple countries, and a track record of system or process transformation. Say whether the remit is operational delivery, remediation, or both.

5. Check the ethics and terms. Ask about fees, the replacement guarantee period, and any restrictions on approaching candidates from your own clients or suppliers.

Many of these firms will also offer an interim director to stabilise things while the permanent search runs. That can be a useful bridge, since a good permanent hire may take three to six months to land. I can draft a role brief or a shortlist of questions to put to the search firms if that would help.