Facilities & Resilience Appointments for Penguin Random House

About Penguin Random House

Penguin Random House (PRH) is the world's largest trade book publisher, formed through the merger of Penguin Group and Random House. It employs more than 10,000 people globally and publishes over 15,000 new titles each year across more than 250 imprints, covering fiction, non-fiction, children's books and digital content. In the UK, Penguin Random House UK and DK operate across multiple locations, with large workforces, complex supply chains and critical operational dependencies.

Our work with Penguin Random House

Maxwell Stephens has recruited two senior appointments for Penguin Random House:

• Group Facilities Director: leading Facilities Management across the UK and Ireland portfolio, including DK London Facilities, won through a competitive tender and run on an exclusive basis.
• Business Continuity Manager: leading business continuity, crisis management and operational resilience across the Penguin Random House and DK UK estate.

Group Facilities Director, UK and Ireland

Penguin Random House selected Maxwell Stephens through a competitive tender involving several specialist recruitment firms to run this search exclusively. Reporting directly to the Group Operations Director, the Group Facilities Director would lead Facilities across the entire UK and Ireland estate, including DK London Facilities. The remit covered:

• strategic leadership of the Group Facilities function
• operational, capital and Group Services budgets, with Facilities budgets exceeding £25 million annually
• estate and property management, including rent reviews, business rates, valuations and lease renewals
• health, safety and environmental compliance, with regular reporting to the Health & Safety Board
• the Facilities team, Helpdesk and agreed SLAs
• benchmarking and managing third-party contracts for security, insurance, maintenance, cleaning, catering, fleet and travel
• capital projects, refurbishment and workplace improvement from planning and tender to completion
• business continuity arrangements

Group-level roles are often filled by strong operators who have never held the property side, or by property professionals who have not led a service function. We searched among senior leaders of large, dispersed corporate estates and assessed their ability to influence at Executive and Board level. NEBOSH, IWFM (formerly BIFM) Level 6 and equivalent credentials formed part of the assessment, and cultural fit was weighted heavily: a director who grates on the organisation will struggle to carry change through a national estate.

The appointee brought significant experience of leading Facilities functions in complex corporate organisations, with a record of improving operational performance, strengthening supplier relationships and delivering major property projects.

The team at Maxwell Stephens really listened. I was keen to find a leadership team with whom I was morally aligned, and a Product that I could really get behind. We negotiated quickly, and fairly.
I would trust Maxwell Stephens implicitly if I were required to extend my own team. A hearty recommendation from me.

Katie Miles
Group Facilities Director, Penguin Random House

Business Continuity Manager, Penguin Random House and DK

To strengthen their resilience framework, Penguin Random House and DK asked us to recruit a Business Continuity Manager to design, implement and continually improve continuity arrangements across multiple UK sites. The remit covered business impact analysis, enterprise risk assessment and recovery planning; crisis management, incident response, disaster recovery and emergency preparedness; governance and compliance reporting, training, testing and simulation exercises; and engagement across Facilities, IT, HR and Governance.

Many candidates have the technical side: BIA methodology, risk assessment, plan writing. Far fewer can also persuade busy department heads to give continuity work priority, run an exercise that exposes weaknesses without alienating anyone, and stay effective during a live incident. We searched across our Facilities Management, operational resilience and business continuity network, with emphasis on candidates who had built and tested frameworks across large multi-site organisations, and assessed technical, operational and leadership competencies alongside stakeholder influence and programme delivery.

The appointee brought extensive continuity and resilience experience, proven BIA and risk assessment capability, crisis and incident management expertise and experience leading testing and simulation exercises. They took responsibility for developing and enhancing continuity arrangements across the organisation.

Why it worked

Both searches were scoped around the whole role rather than a narrow version of it. The Group Facilities Director brief spanned the property portfolio, the supply chain, the budget and the board, and winning the mandate through tender meant it was agreed with the client before the search began. Business continuity sits between facilities, IT, HR and governance and belongs fully to none of them; searches fail when run purely as compliance or purely as facilities appointments, and our network spans both.

If you are recruiting a director-level Facilities leader or a business continuity specialist for a complex estate, get in touch with our team.