One week on from the shock announcement that the Chief Executive Officer of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists Nathan Baker was stepping down after less than eight months in the post, thePipeLine is able to reveal more about the process which led to his appointment as the leader of the UK’s main organisation representing professional archaeologists. This account is based on CIfA’s own published financial accounts and information from CIfA website and social media accounts, as well as other sources, including the website of the high end corporate head-hunters the CIfA Board
engaged to oversea the recruitment process. Taken together the story told by these sources raise fresh questions over how effective the process actually was in delivering an appropriate candidate to take on the role and most of all whether CIfA members received value for money given the process of appointing Mr Baker could have cost over nineteen thousand pounds and bought less than eight months of work? .
A critical document in understanding what took place during the recruitment process is a copy of the advertisement for the post of CEO which has been archived on the CIfA website. Other information is drawn from publicly available documents and websites and it builds a picture of an organisation, CIfA, which was trying to achieve meaningful change, while struggling with its relationship with other leadership bodies in UK archaeology and with the expectations of its own members.
In 2023 CIfA’s governing Board faced a considerable challenge. It the stability of an organisation can be measured in how many Chief Executive Officers it burns through the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists was outstandingly stable. Outgoing CEO Professor Peter Hinton had been in post for over a quarter of a century, overseeing CIfA’s journey from being a simple membership body for field archaeologists in the burgeoning contracting sector supporting the development industry, to achieving chartered status in 2014.
However, adding to the unavoidable uncertainty of a change in the most senior management role at CIfA was the wider challenge of fundamental issues facing the archaeology sector ranging from regular fears for the place of archaeology in the UK planning system, typified by the withdrawal of archaeology as a profession from the CSCS card scheme for construction industry workers, without any prior consultation with any archaeological bodies including CIfA, and the increasingly regular and damaging assaults on the humanities, including archaeology, in UK Higher Education.
However, perhaps of most existential importance to CIfA as a professional body was the growing dissatisfaction among CIfA’s own members caused by the perception that the organisation seemed unable, or unwilling, to grapple with the longstanding issues of poor pay and conditions and the lack of effective career paths for archaeologists. This issue was coming to a head in early 2024 just as the recruitment process for the new CEO was underway with CIfA’s decision to stop issuing recommended pay minima being met with fury from many members, to the extent that, at one stage, the Institute’s leadership narrowly avoided a vote of no confidence.
Given those circumstances, entirely properly, the CIfA Board seems to have undertaken a process to develop their approach to what the post should actually entail. It would not be business as usual.
Crucially it appears also from the advertisement that, rather than conduct the recruitment itself, the CIfA chose to retain a commercial headhunting company, the Mayfair based LSL Group with no less a person than LSL’s own CEO David Sneesby overseeing the process.
Established by Mr Sneesby in 2019, and specialising in work with membership and professional organisations the LSL Group states,
“Our mission at The LSL Group is to enable your organisation to be in its optimum state to deliver the results you want.”
To this end testimonials show it has worked with professional bodies ranging from the Association for Project Management to the British Medical Association and the company provides also leadership coaching as well as recruitment services.
Information in the public domain via the LSL Group website suggests that it is in the latter role that the and LSL first came into contact with the Board and senior management of CIfA, so it was natural that, faced with the need to recruit a new CEO under particularly trying circumstances, it was to LSL that the CIfA Board under honorary chair Dr Pen Foreman, turned.
A testimonial on the LSL website published over the name of Dr Foreman describes a process whereby Mr Sneesby worked closely with CIfA’s recruitment panel developing the job description and applicant pack offering some “very strong recommendations and suggestions”. The result of this was, in Dr Foreman’s words, an ” extraordinary longlist” and and “excellent pool” of “strong candidates”.
In their testimonial Dr Foreman also reveals that Mr Sneesby attracted candidates not just through advertising the post, but also through his own “extensive contacts and networks”.
As we shall see shortly the bulk of the recruitment process appears to have taken place in the 2023-2024 accounting period for the organisation, but the process appears to have continued into the new financial accounting period 2024-2025 because it was in the new financial year, on the afternoon of 25 April 2024 that CIfA members read the following post on the official CIfA account on x-Twitter,
“CIfA is delighted to announce the appointment of a new CEO to replace Peter Hinton, who is retiring from the role after more than 25 years. Nathan Baker will join CIfA as CEO in early June from the Institute of Occupational Medicine, where he is currently Chief Executive.”
The only problem of course is that this apparently extensive and undoubtedly expensive process seems now to have gone horribly wrong with the “superb candidate” lasting barely eight months in the role and, as reported previously in thePipeLine, far from joining CIfA from the Institute for Occupational Medicine, Mr Baker appears never to have actually left his role as CEO with the research charity.
The IOM’s own website and publicly available company records, show that Mr Baker was listed as CEO and Company Secretary of the Institute of Occupational Medicine, including speaking on its behalf at a major industry conference in December 2024, throughout the period from June 2024 to 13 February 2025 when he was also named by CIfA as its CEO.
In retrospect there are also curious aspects to Mr Baker’s tenure. For example, an update on Mr Baker’s activities during what was reported as his first three months in post and issued on the CIfA website and FaceBook group on 18 September 2024 was written in the third person and issued under the name of CIfA’s Marketing and Communications Manager Carl Smith. The post contained no direct quotations from the CEO and was so bland that one member of the Facebook group even questioned whether Mr Baker had been involved in writing it.
They were reassured by the page moderators that he was.
In another curiosity, at the Bundesdenkmalamt, Abteilung für Archäologie’s Runde Tisch Archäologie 2025 Archaeological Round Table held in Vienna on 16 January 2025, CIfA appears to have been represented by Jen Parker Wooding, CIfA’s Senior Professional Standards & Practice Coordinator and not by its CEO as might be expected at a major international event. Especially as the title of the conference paper she delivered was “The building blocks of a professional institute: an overview”. Indeed, outgoing CEO Peter Hinton had spoken at a similar international event in Germany as recently as May 2024.
Broadly, this would appear to be a subject Mr Baker was eminently well qualified to speak about, both in a role with CIfA and his previous experience with professional bodies including the Institute of Occupational Medicine, but then at this point there is a further question which goes begging. Was Nathan Baker ever the CEO of CIfA in any meaningful sense, or at least in any sense the wider membership of CIfA would understand, particularly given what they had been told by the Board?
For example, did those discussions between the CIfA Board, the Recruitment Panel and Mr Sneesby of the LSL Group include the possibility that the appointment might be part time, or even that Mr Baker would act as a consultant working to a specific development brief and carrying out only some of the functions of a CEO?
What went on in the two and a half months between the closing date for applications given in the job advertisement on 2 February 2024 and the announcement of Mr Baker’s appointment on 25 April?
Was Mr Sneesby scoping, or even negotiating, a bespoke appointment with the recruitment panel the Board and a candidate, or candidates?
The debacle of Mr Baker’s appointment to run CIfA, his relatively invisible period as CEO and then his sudden, still unexplained, departure, raises questions about how effective the recruitment process actually was and it raises also questions of how effective is CIfA’s oversight and governance, in particular in ensuring CIfA members received value for money. Around three quarters of the organisation’s income is derived from members subscriptions and subscriptions from affiliated archaeological organisations.
To put the decisions of the CIfA Board in perspective, thePipeLine asked the CEO of an organisation with a similar turnover to CIfA and which has also employed consultants in a search for senior company and board members, what such a process costs. We were told that to recruit a person at a similar grade to the CEO of CIfA would start at around ten thousand pounds if a freelance consultant was used. Bespoke circumstances, or the use of a corporate head-hunter like Mr Sneesby’s company, could easily see the costs climb rapidly and considerably.
We then checked CIfA’s audited accounts which are published on the CIfA website.
This revealed that In the five years to 2024 CIfA spent as little as £514 on staff recruiting [that was in 2021] and the previous highest spend on recruitment was £4574 in 2022.
In 2023-2024, the period during which the bulk of the recruitment process for the CEO post took lace, it jumped to £19,818, up from £1181 the previous year.
It is possible that additional costs were incurred in the 2024-2025 accounting period but that will not be known until CIfA publishes its audited accounts.
Of course, while the outcome of Mr Baker’s appointment might be unfortunate, at least for CIfA, none of this is illegal. Indeed, the use of recruitment consultants is routine in the world of public and professional organisations. If it was not companies like Mr Sneesby’s LSL Group would not exist.
There may even be a perfectly understandable reason for Mr Baker to step down so soon.
Nonetheless CIfA members are entitled to ask their Board want went wrong with Mr Baker’s appointment, especially when CIfA ended the year with an operating loss of £64,561 and the cost of recruiting Mr Baker as CEO, if that is what he was, effectively could have cost over two thousand four hundred pounds for each month Mr Baker was in post?
Unfortunately they cannot ask such questions in the town square of the Social Media. CIfA has disabled comments on the posts announcing Mr Baker was standing down, which it placed on X-Twitter and Facebook.
Of course, it can be asked, quite fairly, why does this matter? After all CIfA is a private company funded primarily by its members and associated organisations, so what business is it of anyone else if they get a senior appointment wrong, even embarrassingly wrong?
The answer to that is simple.
CIfA operates in the public space.
The organisation attempts to set the benchmark ethical standards across the archaeology industry.
CIfA also goes out of its way to say it advocates for archaeology with Government. In other words it is a lobbyist and there is general agreement, and regulations to the effect, that lobbyists should be transparent and accountable.
In short, CIfA’s views matter to anyone with the best interests of archaeology at heart and that includes non-members. This is because, unlike, for example, doctors, archaeology is not a protected profession. You do not have to to be a member of CIfA to call yourself an archaeologist and work as an archaeologist, but CIfA’s positions, codes and even its policy on pay, would still impact on your work. .
The perception of CIfA as a well run, professional organisation also matters, as does any threat to that reputation, as now clearly exists after losing a CEO after at most eight months, especially when that person may not have been fulfilling the totality of the role as members had every right to expect given what they had been told by the Board.
Hearing about the debacle over Nathan Baker’s appointment, a local councillor in the North East of England told Marc Barkman-Astles of Archaeosoup Productions that If they were seeking to work with archaeologists for local heritage landscape or cultural management purposes and they were asked to take CIFA accreditation as a sign of that professional capabilities, the lack of transparency from the accrediting body regarding the loss of its CEO, would not bode well for taking the inquiries much further.
The CIfA Board has been approached repeatedly for comment on various issues relating to the appointment of Mr Baker using the contact e-mail address given to members interested in the matter. Up to the point of publication we have not received any response.
The Institute of Occupational Medicine has also been asked for comment, but we have been met with a similar lack of response.
Lead Image: Recruitment Costs CIfA Accounts for 2023/2024 [thePipeLine via CIfA]
If you have any information about this story please contact thePipeLine in confidence.
Our e-mail address is <PipeLineNews@protonmail.com>
You can DM via BlueSky at @andybrockman.bsky.social
And you can also contact us on the end-to-end-encrypted App Signal which is used by many journalists and news outlets, on @AndyBrockman.25
.
thePipeLine is free to read and we promise it always will be, but researching the kind of story you have just read costs time and money.
If you think it is important that archaeology and heritage has an independent voice speaking truth to power please buy us a Ko-fi
