Technical Services Manager Recruitment for Lord's Cricket Ground

Background

Maxwell Stephens was engaged to fill the Technical Services Manager position within the Estates department at Lord's Cricket Ground. The role carried responsibility for preventive and reactive maintenance regimes, safety compliance and the oversight of critical services, and it demanded a candidate with strong technical expertise and the leadership skills to match.

Owned by Marylebone Cricket Club, Lord's has been on its current site in St John's Wood since 1814. It holds around 31,100 spectators and is home to MCC and Middlesex, as well as hosting England internationals.

The Challenge

Sporting venues are among the more unforgiving environments in facilities management. For most of the week the estate behaves like any large building; on event days it has to perform without fault in front of a full crowd, with power, life-safety and other critical systems under their heaviest load. Maintenance windows are dictated by the fixture list rather than the maintenance plan, and the consequences of a failure are public.

Against that background, the brief from Lord's set a high technical bar. We needed to identify a candidate with a deep understanding of building services, including high voltage networks and distribution. The ideal candidate also had to bring comprehensive knowledge of planned and reactive maintenance operations, health and safety regulations, and asset management within a sporting environment. Engineers with genuine high voltage competence are scarce in any sector; those who also understand how a venue operates are scarcer still.

The Market for This Role

Technical Services Managers at major sports venues carry a heavier compliance load than most building engineers. Fire and life safety, crowd safety and the conditions of the ground's safety certificate all have to be met on event days, on top of the normal planned and reactive maintenance programme.

Our Approach

We ran a careful recruitment strategy to find the right fit for the role:

• Screening against the specification. Every candidate was screened thoroughly against the technical requirements and competencies set out in the job specification, so that the shortlist was built on evidence rather than job titles.
• Targeted use of our network. The Maxwell Stephens team used its network to approach candidates with relevant engineering qualifications and a track record of successful technical delivery.

The Outcome

After a rigorous selection process, we placed a Technical Services Manager. The role covered preventive and reactive maintenance regimes, safety compliance and the oversight of critical services across the ground.

Why This Placement Worked

Technical services roles are sometimes recruited on maintenance management experience alone, with the specialist engineering treated as something the appointee can pick up. In a venue with high voltage infrastructure and event-day pressures, that approach carries real risk. This search put the engineering qualifications and high voltage understanding at the centre of the specification and screened for them first.

If you are recruiting a technical services or engineering manager for a venue where critical systems cannot be allowed to fail on the day, Maxwell Stephens can help you define the specification and reach the engineers who meet it. Get in touch with our team.