Vice President Recruitment In the Digital Age: What You Need To Know
How do you plan Vice President recruitment for various digital transformation initiatives? This guide is a must read to make VP recruiting highly relevant to achieving set goals!
When your company needs top-level candidates for the Vice President role, do you just send a profile description to the HR with some hints and wait for a shortlist of candidates? The interviews are then arranged?
Well, that is definitely not the right way anymore. In fact there are high chances of disastrous results.
Either you might get someone with a flashy background who will turn out to be a misfit for your business. Or you might hire someone who has less expertise, vision, and charisma than most of your competitors.
We are moving forward in a digital economy where the entire business landscape has changed. The leaders you need to guide growth in the future might not be the veterans who are looking back in the golden past.
In this blog, we are focusing on Vice President recruitment for businesses undergoing wide-scale digital transformation.
We think the majority of mid-sized and large companies will be in this category. This blog about Vice President hiring for digital transformation leadership can serve as a valuable reference point.
Vice President Recruitment For Improving Digital Transformation
The role of Vice Presidents (VPs) are unique – they have to guide the C-Suite and the executive management. A VP dons many hats-top-ranking facilitator, intermediary, adviser, collaborator, mentor, and strategic problem solver.
For companies undergoing digital transformation, many new VP roles have come up. Let’s explore the key ones.
1. VP Recruiting For Overcoming Technology Challenges
There are several VP roles involved in assessing and resolving technology challenges in a company. Companies hire a Vice President of Technology Operations to initiate or speed up technology transformation that will undoubtedly be the phase of maximum challenges.
Hiring A VP of Technology Operations should be about hiring a top-level leader who can guide the C-Suite to anticipate, address, and manage the potential problems and resistance to new tech-enabled operations models.
If you need a champion to provide strategic leadership for identifying the right tech investments that will give a high ROI, you can hire a Vice President of Digital Strategy. He or she will assess digital positioning moves and guide the development of well-defined, SMART digital strategy to run the right initiatives for tech-based business transformation.
2. VP Recruiting For Process Transformation
If your company is embarking on an enterprise-wide transformation journey, it means you are ready to remove all off-grade working models enterprise-wide. It also means a huge part of your business is on stake.
You cannot afford a single wrong move.
You need to recruit a genius in process excellence or process transformation. You can consider hiring a VP of Process Excellence or a VP of Operational Excellence. The VP should have experience in building and maintaining a Center of Excellence division which will own all process improvement moves. The VP will also guide the division to align process mapping and future operations design with strategic planning, feasibility needs, and potential opportunities.
You will also have to plan for Vice President staffing solutions – providing the VP with the right staff to achieve the goals set for the role.
3. VP Recruiting For Data-Driven Operations Management
If you think a leader overseeing digital transformation is similar to one for data-driven operations, you can be totally wrong.
Data-driven operations are mostly conducted through integrated platforms that connect all employee work across divisions and geographies and the supply chain. To cite some examples, a firm creating AI-based analytics products to improve diagnosis or treatment of certain diseases, an online financial analytics business, and smart factories.
If you are planning to launch or expand such a business, you will need to hire a Vice President of Data Management or Data Operations. He or she will be an experienced leader who understands and improves data engineering, data science and analytics, and real-time intelligence to improve product design, engineering, and delivery.
You will also have to conduct Vice President staffing accordingly – hiring the right team of data scientists, data modeling experts, and engineers to support the VP.
4. VP Recruiting For Improving Digital Maturity
There is a long line of myths and misinformation related to defining and understanding digital maturity. It becomes necessary to get it right if your company is planning to invest millions in improving digital maturity levels.
There are different phases an organization has to go through when creating insight-driven operational improvement moves. It is best to take advice from an expert digital maturity consulting firm and identify top-level roles you will need to fill for directing all the moves. For example, companies hire a Chief Digital Officer and Process Excellence Consultant along with recruiting a Vice President for Digital Transformation.
Information about different top leadership recruitment needs might bewilder you for a bit. That is natural. But it is the right time to consider moves like Chief Data Officer hiring or senior vice president recruitment for making your digital transformation journey profitable.
The next question we are addressing is whom to hire and what to look for in candidates when going for Vice President hiring. 
Vice President Recruitment For Digitalized Operations: Whom Should You Hire?
You might have identified a need for associate or senior Vice President recruitment to implement digitalized operational models.
Here are some excellent tips to identify the right candidates.
Five Key Things To Consider When Hiring A VP For Digital Roles
1. Technology Background
When we say technology background, it is not about product development or IT help desk. We are referring to the experience in overseeing research, technology investments, proof of concept development, and technology implementations for process redesign and business transformation.
You will be looking for someone who understands value-optimizing tech-based models for different business and production processes, that will be further enhanced through data science and analytics.
2. Certifications
A general understanding does not help when you are making decisions that impact how processes enterprise-wide will be redesigned. You need someone with digital transformation certifications and concrete knowledge.
You can consult with C-Level executive search headhunters with expertise in digital transformation leadership recruitment in your industry to identify what certifications work the best for the role you have in mind.
3. Technology Knowledge of Your Business Segment
There are thousands of technology products that support digitalization and integrated operations models. Your business might already be having its own range of technology systems. Which kind of platform solutions can best integrate with your IT infrastructure? What are the use cases? Should you go for totally customized solutions or choose bespoke IT products that can be customized?
The future leader needs to provide excellence guidance on these matters. If you are planning senior vice president recruitment for digital strategy or operations excellence, ensure the candidates have excellent knowledge of technologies in your industry.
4. Business Skills And Technical Expertise
A VP of data operations, process excellence, or digital transformation should be able to align any technology or data-driven operational moves with business needs, client needs, quality assurance needs, industry standards, compliance, risk management, and financial goals and priorities.
5. Change Management
Your VP of digital transformation will have key responsibilities in partnering with stakeholders across business units on process redesign projects. Look for candidates who have innovative ideas in training and upskilling employees, such as designing practical courses that can be undertaken virtually from any device, anywhere.
What Steps Can Improve Vice President Recruitment?
1. Market Mapping
Market mapping is an activity to acquire a thorough understanding of the job market for the VP role you want to fill.
Find out about the hiring practices and trends in your industry and markets when hiring a VP for digital maturity roles. What kind of talent is available and what kind of candidates can best-fit the duties you have outlined for the VP role in your company?
The most effective way to get such market insights is by taking the services of an expert Vice President executive search headhunter. You will have more chances of attracting the best-qualified candidates.
2. Compensation Benchmarking
When recruiting a Vice President for digitalization moves or going about Vice President staffing to hire a brilliant team for the new VP, your company needs to offer something attractive. Find out about the salary and benefits packages that are being offered in the job market and it should be relevant to the qualifications, experience, and certifications you have specified for the VP role.
Consulting with a top executive search agency will get you instant access to such critical information about compensation and hiring models. But a prosaic approach might not attract candidates. If you offer opportunities that sync with the candidates future goals and current interests, you have a higher chance of not losing great candidates to the competition.
3. Executive Search Consulting and Headhunting
When hiring for top-leadership roles such as Vice Presidents and the C-Suite, you most definitely need to invest in passive recruitment strategies – contacting targeted candidates with the exact combination of knowledge, track record, skills, and leadership style that best fits your company.
How do you find and approach such candidates?
Executive search agency services will be valuable. The company will have a 10x wider talent pool access and the expertise to track talent that best fits the responsibilities of the VP role in your company. Their C-level recruiters also have expertise in formulating plans to attract the right candidates.
The process will take several months if you are dependent on a few in-house resources without a strong network of their own; you might still not find great candidates. On the other hand, a global manpower agency with an executive search arm can find superstar candidates within a short time.
4. Implementing Virtual Recruitment Processes
Virtual recruitment is not just about Skype interviews.
Virtual recruitment processes have matured a lot. You can invite shortlisted candidates to connect with you through a pre-recorded video session. Video-recording systems with built-in parameters can generate scripts that can be used for comparative candidate analysis. Based on the core areas of interest of the candidates, conducting paid video consultations will give you the true measure of their abilities.
Everything from technical assessments and screening rounds for industry knowledge and business knowledge can all be scheduled within clicks. You save a lot of time, cutting down the hiring cycle by 60%-70%.
5. Site Visits And Consultations Before Final Selection
Hasty decisions are never a good idea. With the help of Vice President executive search consultants and their virtual recruitment support, you might speed up the final stage shortlist within a month! That is great!
But do not jump directly to the final negotiations.
Invite the top 3 candidates to your company or its overseas units. Let the candidates understand what they will really be facing and find out how realistically they view and respond to the scenarios. These responses will give you the final clue as to who will be the most motivated and superior fit for your business.
Final Thoughts
A successful executive search for Vice President hiring needs wide talent access and insightful and intuitive engagement practices. You need extensive sourcing expertise and the ability to win attention in a meaningful, strategic manner.
Partnering with a global recruitment agency’s executive search team will involve a fee but that costs much less than all the executive time and resource utilization involved for months by an in-house team.
The outcome will also be superlative – as you find and hire charismatic and best-fit top-level leaders that you would otherwise not have been found.
Consult with our global manpower agency’s executive recruitment experts for Vice President hiring for digital transformation roles.
