How to Market Yourself as an Interim

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Strong skills and a solid track record do not, on their own, make a successful interim career. Interim work is won through relationships and visibility, and many opportunities never go near an agency. If the right people do not know what you offer, they cannot bring you in.

How to Market Yourself as an Interim sets out a practical approach: thinking of yourself as a service, defining your offer around the problems you solve, choosing a target market and reaching the decision-makers who buy. It is for interim managers at any stage, whether you are new to the market or looking to shorten the gaps between assignments.

You do not need to become a marketing expert. The guide gives you three questions to define your positioning, the factors that make a market right for you and a list of routes to market to choose from.

What's inside

The guide moves from mindset to method: what you offer, who you offer it to and how you reach them.

Skills Alone Are No Guarantee of Success: Why updating your CV and sending it to a few providers is not enough, and why thinking of yourself as a service rather than a candidate changes how you win work.
Why Marketing Yourself Is Critical to Success: Why self-marketing comes down to clarity and consistency, and what it changes: less unwanted downtime, more control between roles and better-quality assignments.
Marketing Your Company, Not Yourself: A simple mindset shift for interims running their own limited company that makes positioning more objective and focused, with a tip on writing it as if promoting a firm.
Defining Your Product: Why clients buy solutions rather than job titles, how positioning around a problem the client already recognises makes you stand out, and why specialising tends to raise your chances rather than limit them.
How to Define Your Product: Three questions to sharpen your positioning (what problems you have solved, who has them and what you enjoy solving) plus a one-sentence test for the result.
Identifying Your Market: Why visibility depends on consistency more than a single message, why buyers want a specialist in who you work for as well as what you do, and the cost of staying too broad.
Factors to Consider When Selecting Your Target Market: Why competence, credibility and compatibility matter, useful ways to define a market by size, industry, stage, location or challenge, and the question most people skip.
Routes to Market: How to judge which activities are worth your time, find the routes your market already uses and choose a few you can sustain based on how you work best.
Example Routes to Market: The routes interims most commonly use, from direct outreach and referrals to associations, events, alumni networks and interim service providers, and how to pick the ones that suit you.
Building a Sustainable Interim Career: A closing summary of the approach: define the problems you solve, choose the right market and show up consistently through a small number of routes that reach buyers.

What the data says

Five figures from the guide on interim and contract work and the value of staying visible, each linked to its source.

872,000: On any given day in 2024, 872,000 temporary or contract workers were on assignment through UK recruiters. Source: Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC), Recruitment sector contributes more than £40 billion a year to the UK economy despite tough job market, 2025
7x: Globally, Glassdoor job seekers are seven times more likely to apply after seeing a company's brand ten times or more. Source: Glassdoor, The essential employer branding statistics you need to know, 2025
30%: 30% of UK organisations that recruited rated recruitment/search consultants among their most effective attraction methods. Source: CIPD, Resourcing and talent planning report 2024
10: Gartner research found the average employee experienced 10 planned enterprise changes in 2022, up from two in 2016. Source: Harvard Business Review (Gartner research), Employees Are Losing Patience with Change Initiatives, 2023
11%: About one in nine (11%) of the FM vacancies Maxwell Stephens advertised from 2023 to 2026 were interim or contract roles. Source: Maxwell Stephens analysis of 497 advertised vacancies, May 2023 – September 2026

Sources checked in September 2026. Maxwell Stephens figures are drawn from our own published vacancies and placement records.

See it in practice

Supporting Babylon Health Through a Complex Workplace Relocation

Babylon Health needed an experienced Interim Facilities Manager to provide immediate operational leadership during a major relocation and restack programme across its Head Office locations. Maxwell Stephens focused the search on interim facilities managers with proven relocation and restack expertise, multi-site experience and the composure to perform in a fast-paced, high-growth environment. The appointed interim integrated quickly, took responsibility for both facilities operations and the relocation programme, and kept day-to-day services running with minimal disruption to the business. Health, safety and compliance standards were maintained throughout the transition.

It shows the value of positioning around a recognisable problem: the client was looking for someone who had run a relocation before, not simply a job title.

Read the full case study or browse all case studies.

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Who this guide is for

Interim managers and consultants at any stage, including those new to interim work, experienced interims running their own limited company who want less downtime between assignments, and facilities, estates and workplace professionals considering interim assignments.

Next steps

Browse our current Facilities Management vacancies, upload your CV so a consultant can contact you about suitable roles, or join our mailing list for new vacancies and market updates.