Senior recruitment in
Edinburgh

Edinburgh is the second largest UK senior financial services hub after London and the centre of gravity for asset management, life insurance, wealth and private banking leadership outside the M25. Standard Life Aberdeen (abrdn), Scottish Widows, Royal London, Baillie Gifford, NatWest Group, Tesco Bank and dozens of mid-market PE-backed financial services businesses anchor the senior pool. The city has also matured into a credible secondary tech hub thanks to Skyscanner, FanDuel, Optos, Float, the wider University of Edinburgh AI cluster and the EICC-anchored fintech scene.

A typical Go Ahead HiRe Edinburgh brief is a Head of Distribution or Head of Investments for an asset manager, a CFO or COO for a Scottish PE-backed business, a VP Engineering for a Skyscanner-alumni-led scale-up, or a Country Manager UK for a continental European group choosing Edinburgh over London for cost or talent reasons. Comp at the same seniority typically runs 20 to 30 percent below London on the commercial side and roughly 10 to 15 percent below on the asset management and quantitative side.

Senior Edinburgh hires tend to be unusually rooted geographically: many candidates have been in the city for a decade or more and are not realistically open to relocation. We run Edinburgh searches with Edinburgh-based candidate calibration calls and a hard preference for in-market candidates. Glasgow can be reached in under an hour by train and broadens the candidate pool meaningfully for digital, professional services and operations roles.