Vice President Intelligent Automation
BPM Solutions Provider
One of our clients which is a leading provider of customized Business Process Management (BPM) services spanning across different verticals including BFS, Healthcare, Telecom & Media, Insurance, Mortgages and Utilities having global presence including the US, UK, India, and the Philippines was looking to onboard an Intelligent Automation (IA) – Global Market Leader, whichis a critical role that will identify and drive digital transformation initiatives of critical strategic importance to their customers. This (IA) practice focuses on providing Robotic Process Automation, Operational Analytics, Data Intake, and Machine learning solutions for critical business processes to major industries globally. The (IA) Global Market Leader will report to the CDO and will drive the digital transformation initiatives and lead a high performing Intelligent Automation team to grow their presence in selected industries in the USA, UK, and Europe. Currently, all the organizations want to have Intelligent Automation as it improves operational efficiency, cut costs, and enhance overall customer satisfaction across the value chain.
While it was really hard to hunt a candidate having both the technical and sales characteristics in Intelligent Automation but we managed to attract a senior executive having 25+ Years of experience including 12+ Years of experience in BPO/BPM Domain. He was working with an IT Consulting firm having great experience in Practice Sales, managing partnerships, Digital Operations, Consulting with great technical expertise having got exposed to customer relationship management, digital process automation, and business process management development organization in the past.
Challenge
Vantedge Search was contacted by a C Level professional who was working with the same organization. They asked us to hunt a senior professional reporting to him directly who can lead and grow IA Practice globally, create GTM Strategies – define the target market, value proposition, the vision on how to grow and manage the IA business and ways to increase profitable growth by addressing marketing and promotion, Alliance Management, creating customized offerings and acting as an IA SME, he would be responsible for enabling the sales team to win logos. He will also act as a strong advisor to customers and an industry thought leader in Automation and will build strong executive connections with major product partners. He will manage a team comprising of the technical executives and sales professionals. The candidate would be judged on below factors:-
- Revenue growth and profitability from digital deals from existing and new clients
- Identifying and adoption of cutting-edge automation technologies
- Institutionalization of new processes for both new and existing
The major challenge that we faced is the COVID-19 Pandemic situation due to which the candidates were not willing to change the job at this time as they were well settled in their organization. To convince them to switch a job required the minutest detail of our client which we got after speaking to the Leadership Team of our client.
Working alongside with BU heads/operations heads, Sales teams, CDO, CHRO & CFO, the client was looking for a candidate who worked in BPM/BPO space and had worked in the capacity of leading the entire Global practice having a preference towards a professional having quite good expertise in selling BPO Services and have led Partnership and Alliances. Being at the level of VP, the Client also expects a candidate to have led a global team of resources.
Another biggest challenge was NO-Poach with other Organizations. As there are scarce BPO/BPM Organizations, they had a clause that they can’t hire a candidate from some specific organizations but unfortunately, we are getting most of the candidates from the same organization.
Next, we only had to contact only the candidates that we analyzed with our years of experience would live up to the client’s expectations as we had to maintain confidentiality.
Strategy
While we understood the client expectations from this role we defined our strategy in 4 steps.
- Assigning the best teams to the task for prompt and qualitative delivery.
- Research.
- Recruitment – Contacting the candidates over a call and Closing the candidate.
- Presenting the candidate to the client
The first and foremost step was to find out the best team that can work on IA Practice roles. Being an executive search company, we have assigned teams for different technology requirements. So we picked out a team that started working exclusively on this role to help our client with the best talent present in the market. This team began their work by going through its internal database that can meet the client’s requirements.
Once they have gone through their data the next step is the research work. It began with the collection of the minutest detail of our client, about their vision, team presence, and size, knowing about their current projects.
The second mode of research was to hunt the candidates from the organizations that provide BPO/BPM Solutions but here some of the organizations are humungous in size while some are smaller in size. So are per the organizational hierarchy, we started approaching them who were having similar KRA’s as required by our client. For smaller organizations, we approached the C Class executives as well and for bigger organizations, we approached the candidate as per their KRA. The reports of Forrester and Gartner helped us a lot in getting a good understanding of the competitors and about our target companies. There was no location constraint as due to pandemic situation our client wanted to make the employee work from his/her home office so we had the liberty to look out for candidates all across the US.
Next comes the calling part: – After approaching candidates using LinkedIn as a platform we were able to get the availability. The candidates were highly impressed with the vision and unique products that the client is trying to build considering how BPO will look in the next 10 years and how they can play a vital role in the Client’s growth and success. They were amazed to know our client presence in different verticals and how they are automating the manual process to increase efficiency. We also let our candidates know about the awards that our Client has won in the recent past that acted as a boosting factor. We emphasized our client success by mentioning some of the recent examples where they have led the entire business transformation for different banks and Mortgages Organizations that led to an overall cost reduction of GBP 1 Million.
We previously shared some sample profiles to our client to know that are we on the right track as expected by our client.
Results
We shared 5 candidates to our client that seems the best out of a pool of candidates. These 5 candidates that we shared are of IT Consulting firms or BPO/BPM Solutions Providers. The candidates that we shortlisted from IT consulting firms were exposed to BPO/BPM either in their current role or the past. With the combined effort of our recruitment team, client’s Leadership Team, and after interviews with C Class executives, we were able to attract a senior candidate from an IT consulting firm who previously worked with BPM Software Development Company in the past. He completed his BS and MBA from one of the reputed colleges in the US and had been associated with BPO / BPM for the past 13+ years having worked with top BPO/BPM Organization. In his current role, he was acting as a Practice Leader for a global practice and leading the total Practice of Digital Automation and AI (BPM, RPA, and AI) which is USD XXXM Practice. He also brought XX BPS Transformation deals in 2019 generating automation services revenue in the range of $XXM over X years across call center, middle office & core back-office operations.
He also led Partnerships and Alliances with UIPath and Workfusion, Automation Anywhere from scratch, and had also managed Analyst relations with Forrester due to which his company was recognized as DPA quadrant by Forrester. He has presented several White papers worldwide and has been a noted speaker at different conferences. All these characteristics make him an ideal candidate for this role with our client and we are sure that he will play a very vital role in the client’s growth and will live up to our client expectations.