Recruitment: Spotlight on the Olympias Music Foundation & Christian Bloor

We’d like to spotlight a Funding Plus collaboration between Christian Bloor – Bruntwood’s Recruitment Lead – and the Olympias Music Foundation.

When the Olympias Music Foundation – an award-winning Manchester charity that champions diversity in music – needed to recruit a Development Director, and then the following year a Programme Manager and Programme & Finance Coordinator, they were keen to gain external guidance. Through Funding Plus, we linked them to recruitment expert Christian Bloor who used his Bruntwood Cares Hours (time paid for by Bruntwood to release colleagues to work on community projects) to help Olympias successfully attract the best candidates.

Christian assisted with the recruitment process from end to end helping Olympias with:

• assessing the skills available in the market
• benchmarking salaries
• building role profiles and putting together adverts to publicise the roles
• shortlisting candidates
• interviewing
• assisting with final selections and providing feedback to unsuccessful candidates.

“We successfully recruited three candidates at various levels into the team, purely based on Jo’s (Dr Jo Yee Cheung, Chief Executive, Olympias Music Foundation) input and willingness to put time into the process. From carefully considering the skill set and behaviours needed to deliver appropriate adverts, to providing vibrancy and colour to job descriptions through imagery, right through to carefully shortling and preparing for a quality and consistent interview process, Jo was involved every step of the way. 

It does take time, and when you’re short of capacity (either through someone leaving or requiring a new hire) it’s easy to just hope the right person will appear. However, the crux of it is that the more effort you put into the process the better the outcome. It might sound exhausting on top of the day to day, but the reality is if you attract the wrong people then that’ll be a lot of time wasted on interviewing and you’ll have missed your chance to bring a new exciting role to the market.

The reason it all worked successfully is down to Jo and her willingness to take advice on board, her actions and time spent supporting the process and the effort and care she put into getting every detail right.” – Christian Bloor, Recruitment Lead at Bruntwood

Jo agrees that the recruitments ran very smoothly. Not just that, but Olympias have seen clear, long-term benefits to collaborating on such a considered recruitment project with an expert in the field:

“Despite the obvious pressures of recruitment and the quick-fire nature of interviews and call-backs, working with Christian on the days he came in to help at Olympias were great fun! It was hugely inspiring to witness someone working at such a high-level to understand our specific needs and challenges as a charity and supporting us to get to the best possible outcome. As a small charity, access to this kind of level of skill and expertise is often outside of our reach, but with Christian’s help, we were able to recruit three outstanding members to join our small team – who are still with us to this day!

Working with Christian has had long-term benefits for us as a charity, not only in terms of building a team of people who reflect our vision and values as a charity, but also through lessons we’ve been able to embed about the best ways of managing and retaining talent at our organisation.” – Dr Jo Yee Cheung, Chief Executive, Olympias Music Foundation

Olympias benefitted through the successful recruitment process and the long-term lessons they’ve embedded into their organisation, whilst being able to apply his professional expertise to assist a charity in this way was a refreshing, rewarding and enjoyable experience for Christian:

“It was a joy to work with Jo and the Olympias team, and it’s always a pleasure to be able to use my professional skills on a recruitment project that has a tangible and valuable benefit on a local charity, and a direct impact on the local community. I’m always happy to give time to people who really value the importance of getting a Recruitment process right, and are willing to put the effort in to achieve the right results.” – Christian

At the OCT, it’s been a pleasure to see this relationship develop and to know that this connection has added value to the funding we provide.

If you’re an OCT grantholder and require support with a specific recruitment challenge, please don’t hesitate to check out the resources we have shared and get in touch with the Trust team if needed.

(The Olympias Music Foundation champions diversity in music – among other projects, they provide instrumental lessons for disadvantaged children in the local area and run community choirs for diverse women and school children. They believe that everyone should be given the opportunity to participate in music. The OCT has been involved with Olympias for several years, supporting their plans for expansion of the musical education in which they specialise, and, most recently, funding Olympias’ newest project, the Recycled Orchestra, which will utilise a team of community luthiers – instrument makers – to repair 100 second-hand instruments in 2025 for the young musicians of Manchester.)