Solutions Consultant, IT/OT Convergence and Industrial Automation
A global industrial automation business who specialise in Mission Critical OT/IT environments. This client had made a number of successful acquisitions to bolster their product portfolio as well as building Innovation and Engineering Centres as they move to a solution centric model.
The Client
A global industrial automation business who specializes in Mission Critical OT/IT environments. A long and successful history in providing assembled products to industrial ITC environments. This client had made several successful acquisitions to bolster their product portfolio as well as building Innovation and Engineering Centres as they move to a solution centric model. They now require the right team to start to deliver these solutions.
The Role
After a sustained period of non-organic growth through M&A and investment in the Innovation and Engineering centres, this client now needed to build a team to lead a phase of organic growth as they put in to action their solution delivery model.
They had strong, global, technical and sales teams but now needed a team of Commercially focused technical delivery engineers. The right type of person would have the ability to position the benefits of our client’s solution, they would act as the technical support to the sales team and as the subject matter expert to the end customer. Bringing to life and effectually positioning our client’s solution.
The move to bringing in Solutions Consultants would be a completely new hire. We had been asked to identify an initial round of 5 consultants in the US, LATAM & Canada – the first hires in a new global delivery team.
About the author
Having started his career in Executive Search in 1998, Doug set up Collingwood in 2005 alongside his wife, Claire Mackay.
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The Solution
This position would report into the Innovation team and have close ties with sales and technical delivery. In order to ensure that we had input from all of the relevant areas of business we first had a client briefing with the leaders of each of these functions. We then drew up a candidate specification, which was approved by the client.
We also had to ensure that we clearly understood the nuances of each geographical location. For example, some had a more mature function in place meaning that a less experienced candidate with potential could be the right hire, some had no presence at all meaning a more experienced person/team would be needed and some had specialist verticals particular to the region.
Because of the specialist nature of the environments in which our client delivers its solutions we needed to find and attract people from the competitor landscape. As our client did not yet have much collateral around the work they had been doing we also built a story around the opportunity to discuss with candidates.
We evolved this story one step further to advise our client on some activities that they could do to help in attracting the right talent. As a part of the candidate attraction process our client put together, on our advice, a promotional video featuring leaders, peers and HR – a really effective tool in bringing to life the people and personalities in this business.
We also put in place bi-weekly catch up calls with all the relevant stakeholders, were we delivered regular updates on the candidates we were speaking with at each stage of the interview process in each region. We also provided qualitative and quantitative insights and data on the work that we were carrying out – therefore setting the standard and blueprint not only for this round of recruitment but for 2022 and beyond.
The Result
Within a 12 week period 5 separate shortlists were submitted spanning LATAM, N. America and Canada. Having identified over 300 candidates across multiple regions, interviewing in excess of 100 candidates, we successfully negotiated offers for 5 candidates.
The candidates found had mix of several to over 10 years experience in their field. We attracted candidates from competitor organisations, often from well established teams and functions and worked with them to join a highly agile and newly developed team. Guiding them through an interview process spanning several rounds, and also co-ordinating decision makers from Europe, LATAM and the US.
As I write this we are already preparing to work on the recruitment strategy for 2022, knowing that we have a successful methodology in place which we have built in partnership with our client.
