We’re Blair West - Blair West

Our purpose from day one

Founded in 2019 by David Blair and Simon West, Blair West began with an unexpected meeting. Each independently sought advice on launching an employee-owned recruitment firm in Newcastle. Introduced by mutual contacts, their aligned ambition to create a different type of recruitment business became clear, setting in motion Blair West’s distinctive journey and clear purpose.

Combining expertise from recruitment, corporate finance, investment, and advisory backgrounds, David and Simon saw a clear market gap executive search tailored explicitly for private equity and investment-backed businesses. Recognising the unique complexities and pressures of these environments, they set out to deliver authentic, insightful, and credible recruitment solutions, focusing their efforts on ambitious, high-growth companies intially in the North East.

Today, Blair West is a trusted national partner, still proudly headquartered in Newcastle. We’ve expanded our services beyond executive search into specialised finance recruitment, successfully building entire finance functions for numerous growth-oriented organisations. Our expertise serves both investment-backed firms and major PLCs, consistently reinforcing our reputation for delivering excellence across executive, leadership, operations, sales, marketing, technology, and finance roles.

Central to our success is our employee ownership model. From two founders in a coffee shop outlining guiding values, Blair West has grown to 18 dedicated employees, half of whom hold ownership stakes. We maintain a 100% reappointment rate from our private equity clients, reflecting our original intention: a business owned by its people, committed to meaningful partnerships and recruitment done differently.

Our Values

We genuinely seek to understand your business, ambitions, and challenges before recommending solutions. Listening ensures we provide recruitment tailored precisely to your needs, never assuming one size fits all.

The best recruitment outcomes happen when we combine your deep knowledge of your business with our specialist networks and market insight. By working openly together with you, we deliver talent solutions that genuinely fit, ensuring mutual and lasting success.

Quality matters deeply to us and we believe you can’t have a quality recruitment service without integrity. We’re transparent, honest, and unafraid of candid conversations, ensuring clarity and genuine value at every stage of the recruitment journey.

Our focus is firmly on outcomes. We engage where we add real value, approaching each role with urgency and energy, committed to delivering impact that we can be proud of.

We never settle for good enough. By continuously challenging conventions, actively seeking honest feedback, and refining our methods, we pursue excellence in everything we do.