Kingspan Insulation
How Sales Recruit UK placed two Area Sales Managers for Kingspan Insulation by looking outside the sector for cultural fit.
Client Overview
Kingspan Insulation is one of the UK's leading manufacturers of premium and high-performance rigid insulation products for roofs, walls, floors and building services. Part of the global Kingspan Group, the business supplies PIR, phenolic and other insulation systems to housebuilders, contractors, M&E specifiers and the wider construction supply chain through builders' merchants, distributors and direct specification routes. Selling Kingspan products is technical, programme-driven and specification-led, and the salespeople responsible for territory growth carry meaningful responsibility for commercial performance.
The Brief
Sales Recruit UK worked with Kingspan Insulation across more than a decade, filling Area Sales Manager roles in Scotland and beyond before Kingspan built out its own internal talent acquisition team. Each search came at a point where the regional management team needed someone capable of stepping into a strategic territory, managing the merchant base, supporting the contractor and specifier community, and protecting margin in a competitive insulation market.
The Challenge
Previous searches had drawn candidates almost exclusively from inside the insulation sector, and the regional sales leadership had become frustrated with the calibre of people coming through. Candidates were arriving ill-prepared, lacking commercial sharpness, and showing little genuine understanding of either the business or the role on offer. The shortlists were stale because the talent pool was stale. Kingspan needed a different type of candidate, one who would bring fresh thinking and the right cultural attributes, but the sector itself was not producing them.
What Sales Recruit UK Did
Sales Recruit UK took the brief out of the insulation sector entirely. Each search focused on adjacent construction product markets where the route to market shared the same shape, selling through merchants to contractors with specification influence at the back end, but where the candidate pool had not been picked over by insulation recruiters. The SRUK Fit Score process evaluated each candidate across six dimensions: sector and adjacent-sector knowledge, route-to-market alignment, commercial track record, behavioural profile, cultural fit and motivation. Cultural fit and motivation were weighted heavily on every Kingspan brief, because the previous problem had not been a knowledge gap, it had been a fit gap.
The Outcome
On one of the most significant searches, Kingspan narrowed the shortlist to two strong candidates and made the decision to hire both, placing the second into an adjacent role within the business rather than letting the candidate go. Both went on to perform strongly inside Kingspan and were later promoted into more senior commercial positions. Sales Recruit UK returned to the brief multiple times over the following decade until Kingspan brought talent acquisition fully in-house. The repeat work, and the long tenure of the candidates placed, are the clearest measure of a search process that fit how Kingspan sells.