Vice President & Strategy Officer
Global IT consulting firm
One of our global professional services firms is specialized in making business transformation real and drive digital-led innovation and digitally-enable intelligent operations for their clients, guided by experience running thousands of processes for hundreds of Global Fortune 500 companies, with presence in more than 20 countries, having end-to-end expertise to connect every dot, reimagine every process and reinvent companies’ ways of working.
They wanted our help in bringing a Vice President who can align with their focus to make sure they are delivering what they promise. People who think with design, dream in digital and solve problems with data and analytics. People who obsess over operations, focus on the details and lead change by being curious, incisive and courageous in everything they do—on a foundation of unyielding integrity.
This person would be a “single point of contact” for both the client and their customers to provide a unified experience or act as a single “driver” of the car, for mega transformation projects involving multi-towers, teams across geographies, through a combination of service lines, digital, practice and transitions.
Importance of Digital Transformation
Adapting to digital is more than a thought in business today, companies must begin and progress their transition towards digital by removing process stagnancy and current slack in the system. With so many companies running for a competitive edge within the industry, success will come to the businesses that ensure their workforce is skilled in the best practices of the digital age.
Since Digital speed is way ahead of the traditional way of doing business the pace becomes essential to stay ahead of the competition.
Challenges
We were contacted by our client to ensure we are providing a candidate who not only comes with a similar background but also a technical savvy with experience in successfully leading design and development projects, with a blend of Leadership who can grow/ develop and mentor a new team. Someone presentable with a demonstrated experience running a meeting or large scale presentation with ease in front of senior executives.
Since these leadership roles are challenging in a sense they shape the future of the client’s success and it is the current hiring which decides the future trends and our relationship with the client as well so we were focusing on Candidates having longevity during their career with Business Acumen, Resourceful, diversified, and someone who has created an impact in past to his customers by bringing in visible changes around the overall business.
Sticking with a provided budget and filling the role with the 100 % match is a unique kind of experience at the same time it is a challenge as this role was going to shape our clients cloud offerings and practices.
The client’s Chief Digital Officer along with their top executive recruitment team joined us over a call to provide us with the critical insights of the role and asked us to research the available talent pool, gauged our capabilities to conduct an executive search.
We did our market research and presented an initial pool of candidates to our client they finally agreed with discernment and provided a nod to go ahead and accomplish the assignment.
This role was supposed to hold end-to-end accountability of multimillion $ programs success through the delivery cycle (transformation, blue-printing, work transfer, digital delivery, etc.). Create an Alpha team of project managers drawn from consulting, digital, practice, verticals, change and transitions. All these functions needed to be orchestrated into a single consistent performance to meet the program success criteria concerning client expectations, business outcomes, and margin and revenue commitments. Collaborating with customers to identify opportunities that address critical business needs.
Hence we had to come up with a team of skilled and topmost technical resources who would be instrumental in representing us as well as our client with the fervor of conducting market research and tap the talent pool.
Strategy
For this level of an executive search, we have a team of senior executives who not only knows our client but their competition, capabilities, global presence, USP in a way to sell the client’s potential in the market. They are very aware of portfolio & revenue size, team size, team structure, hierarchy; they know where the competition lies and what it takes to get the right set of skills and experience along with knowledge of US market, geography, local flavor, current circumstances with a deep understanding of the various technologies and trends.
We started working closely with the Global Head of the Talent Acquisition to keep abreast of our current progress as well as the market findings. We started with researching the product which our client has created to enable the transformation as well as their strategy of customizing it and providing the services to the customers. We also researched the top 3 competitors and their product to ensure we get the right set of people in our search. We found out 2 of the major competitors of our client and started creating an initial pool which we later supplied to the global TA head and CTO to ensure we are on the right track.
Our search was primarily revolving around Top IT consulting firms with similar offerings in the digital space like our client’s. Once we identified what kind of products and services our competitors are offering it became easy for us to tap the right set of people with a flavor of technical as well sales-focused who can help our clients business as well by doing cross-sale/ up-sale and closing potential new deals.
Our client wanted someone to be based in Mid East coast, someone who can travel as much as 70% within east and central zone, as most of the customers they are focusing on are based on this geography. The position also has a blend of core technical representation as well as sales piece in it, someone who knows how the pre-sales is done and someone who has been a part of creating future roadmap and delivery during their past engagements with a focus on organic growth, hence this was a major challenge to find the candidate with all of these skills. Since we were glued with our client in the assignment and simultaneously discussing the progress and potential candidates, it helped a lot to secure a right set of people and talent.
When we began talking to the potential candidates, they were elated to know on our client’s presence and product, the segment they are targeting and industries they are focusing around in terms of helping them achieve a successful digital transformation. When we started delineating the role and started to link with their current role, offerings and vertical with how our client would like to achieve these objectives they were thrilled to see the kind of research we had done and they were ecstatic how beautifully we had correlated their current portfolio with this role. We also started to explain why this role would be fit with their future aspiration, they also brought their experience and we created all the notes revolving around their experience to see why they would be a potential fit.
We knew the challenges which we were going to face and which intrinsically are associated with this type of assignment, including the limited talent pool, and the difficulty of finding the similar set of people, hence we had done our research prior hopping on directly to the calls, we made sure that we are throwing light on their current portfolio and previous experience to dig in the details to secure a potential interest and aspiration.
Result
After talking to several candidates, setting up their multiple interviews with the C- level leadership of client, we were able to eventually secure an executive who was the head of digital and customer experience practice with his current client having a 20+ year of a track record of experience. He was serving in the leadership roles and for over For 12 years, he served in senior roles and on advising boards, in which he successfully designed and executed organic and acquisitive growth strategies and process improvements that resulted in enhanced enterprise and shareholder value. Beyond that, he had proven experience in taking the organization through a growth trajectory, with a core focus on AI, ML, Robotics, Intelligent Automation, Managing all aspects of programs, including conducting business development, directing project planning and staffing, tracking project status, leading teams,, contributing to evolution and maturity of the client relationship and managing an overall operating budget of $XX from multiple large and mid-sized programs as well as Improving ROI up to 10% to 15% on client’s digital campaigns by developing and implementing new digital marketing program design and activation experience, process, and technology.
He was diversified, having all the core technical, professional skills with managing large teams, big P&L which was required with his corporate presence and presentation skills. He knew client’s business and presence with investment in this product and was able to articulate and correlate his current experience, at the same time he had presented his ideas in terms how would he like to target the market as his next 5 years plan with his engaging leadership skills which were evident when he presented some of the key case studies during the final round of interview.
He presented a clear roadmap to facilitate 20% to 30% of growth by creating a customer experience. He also presented a blueprint as to how he can push incremental growth post-launch, by designing Go-To-Market, product innovation, digital, and experience strategies, for a new product offering for leading consumer product company as well as recapturing lost revenues due to multiple factors involved, at the same time he can drive additional annual revenue by constructing digital (i.e., online, mobile, and social) strategy for external clients.
All of these characteristics made him an ideal candidate for our client, as they were looking for someone who has the entire blend to take their digital presence ahead of the competition with an approach for continued growth and profitability.