Impress employers and recruiters.
Choose from hundreds of resume examples.

Target Resume Now

About the Role

The Immigration Chief Operating Officer (COO) is accountable for the day-to-day operation of the Immigration Service Line, ensuring the business operates at scale, delivers sustained margin improvement, and releases capacity to support growth. This role provides enterprise-level operational leadership across Immigration, translating strategic priorities into a globally consistent, commercially disciplined operating model.

Responsibilities

Partner with the Immigration Global Lead to execute agreed strategic priorities into operational priorities that drive margin expansion, scalability, and capacity release.
Ensure transformation recommendations are implemented, embedded, and sustained into business-as-usual operations.
Take ownership for operational adoption, sustainability, and value realisation of transformation outcomes.
Drive disciplined execution of agreed operating model changes across regions, making trade-offs across cost, talent, technology, and delivery capacity to achieve commercial objectives.
Establish and maintain operational governance that ensures transformation outcomes are consistently implemented, measured, and improved post-implementation.
Ensure transformation efforts are connected to measurable commercial outcomes, including margin improvement, scalability, productivity, quality, and capacity release.
Own and continuously improve BAU performance of the global operating model, ensuring it supports scalable delivery, consistent quality, and efficient use of resources.
Align regional and country leadership teams around a single, globally coherent way of working, balancing standardisation with local regulatory and market requirements.
Oversee day-to-day operations across delivery centres, driving utilisation, throughput, and operational efficiency.
Establish standard operating rhythms, performance dashboards, and KPIs that provide clear visibility into capacity, productivity, quality, and cost.
Drive rigorous operational discipline, ensuring deviation from targets are quickly addressed through corrective actions and leadership interventions.
Identify and mitigate operational risks, ensuring business continuity, compliance, and adherence to global standards.
Set and reinforce global standards for how Immigration operates across markets, ensuring regional flexibility where required while reducing unnecessary variation in core processes, decision rights, delivery practices, and performance management.
Lead the ongoing simplification and standardization of operational practices to improve consistency, reduce complexity, and enable scalable growth.
Lead the operational standardization of M&A activity within Immigration, ensuring acquired, transitioned, or newly integrated teams are brought into a consistent global operating model.
Define the core operating standards, governance routines, performance expectations, and integration milestones required for M&A deals.
Partner with relevant teams to ensure operational integration plans are commercially sound, executable, and aligned to Immigration’s global delivery model.
Assess operational differences across acquired or integrated businesses and develop pragmatic plans to bring them into standard ways of working.
Ensure M&A integration activity supports margin improvement, scalability, client service consistency, risk management, and capacity planning.
Establish repeatable playbooks, metrics, and governance mechanisms for Immigration M&A integration.
Monitor post-integration performance and address gaps in adoption, efficiency, quality, or compliance.
Own and actively manage the Immigration inorganic growth funnel, working with leadership to identify, prioritise, and track potential M&A targets.
Oversee operational due diligence for potential M&A deals, coordinating with relevant teams to assess target operating models, delivery capability, talent, and integration risk.
Own the onboarding and integration of successful acquisitions into Immigration, and drive post-deal value creation.
Own, in partnership with Finance, a single source of truth for financial and operational performance.
Play a central role in budgeting, forecasting, and financial planning, ensuring operational decisions actively support margin improvement and sustainable growth.
Use data-driven insights to identify opportunities for cost optimisation, leverage improvement, and capacity release.
Support shared accountability with the Immigration Global Lead for profitability and long-term financial performance.
Ensure M&A integration plans include clear financial, operational, and performance assumptions, with mechanisms to track expected synergies, efficiencies, and margin improvements.
Use operational and financial insights to identify where standardization can improve profitability and release capacity for growth.
Collaborate with HR to own execution of the global workforce strategy aligned to growth plans, evolving delivery models, and transformation outcomes.
Translate transformation recommendations into practical workforce actions.
Monitor and actively manage workforce capacity, utilisation, productivity, and turnover to ensure the organisation operates at optimal efficiency.
Ensure global workforce planning avoids structural underutilisation, bottlenecks, or talent shortages.
Ensure workforce implications of M&A activity are assessed early and translated into practical integration plans.
Partner with HR and business leaders to ensure acquired or integrated teams are effectively aligned to Immigration’s operating model, performance expectations, and leadership routines.

Requirements

Senior operational leadership experience ideally within a global professional services firm (e.g. legal, consulting, accounting, advisory, or similar).
Proven experience embedding large-scale transformation outcomes into BAU operations, rather than solely designing or running transformation programmes.
Demonstrated experience supporting M&A integration, post-deal operational standardization, business integration, or large-scale operating model alignment.
Understanding of professional services economics, including utilisation, leverage, margin management, capacity planning, and delivery models.
Demonstrated ability to align and influence global, matrixed leadership teams, including senior partners and executives.
Strong commercial mindset with a track record of improving margins, scaling operations, and releasing capacity to fund growth.
Comfortable operating alongside a central transformation function, with clarity on ownership between design, delivery, and BAU adoption.
Strong ability to bring structure, consistency, and execution discipline to complex environments where legacy practices, regional differences, or acquired business models need to be standardized over time.

Experience Level

Senior operational leadership experience