Hiring Industrial Leaders

When it comes to leadership positions in your industrial company, there are a wide variety of factors that you need to take into consideration. The requirements that are unique to your company, industry, and geographic location.

This is a general guide for all specialized industrial businesses. However, here you can find a range of specific industry guides I have made including hiring for infrastructure, mining & minerals, automotive, and more.

1. What stage is the business?

   The C-suite that you require to establish your first factory is probably not going to be the same C-suite that you would select in order to acquire and restructure a factory located in another country. You need to take into consideration the required expertise and experience that they need to have based on the current and future state of your business.

   So it’s important for a board of directors and the remaining C-suite to consider what is the best direction for this business.  What are the major challenges you as a team in the next few years?  What does overcoming those challenges look like? This preparation helps you with the next point.

2. What do you need that leader to do?

   Given now you have established your business position, you should have a better idea of the experience a leader should have to best perform at this task.  This information is incredibly valuable to your executive search team and your external executive recruiting agency.  Helping them focus on finding people with experience and successful history doing what you need your new leader to do.

   However, suppose you are hiring an executive, senior manager, or a team in a new country.  In that case, they may have invaluable experience and knowledge, which may change your business’s direction, given the input they can provide.  It’s essential to bring this vision to the interview process as a core topic to talk about.  This will help you learn about each candidate’s unique experience and opinion of the tasks at hand.

3. What would their success look like?

   When hiring a new leader for your business, you must consider what success looks like.  This helps you design your compensation and bonus structure to encourage them to perform the way that produces that results with aspects such as cost per yield, output rate, revenue, or whatever the company needs to focus on.

   Compensation packages greatly change the priorities of your leadership.  It is important that there are people in your directors/ leadership keeping an eye as the leader develops in their role.  The incentives you put in place work as desired in the company’s interest and are not being gamed or potentially damaging.

4. Who are they working with? How much do they need to understand the work your specialists do?

   Depending on your industry, you may work with some particular software, work within some very demanding local regulations, and depending on your company structure, your next C-level hir might need to have working experience in these regions or technologies.

   This depends significantly on your company structure and the current people in place.  So it’s important to consider the skills gaps which may be present in your team, and then does your new hire have the skill to fill them?  Or modify your team to account for them in other ways.  You may need to hire more than just one person to accomplish this goal, given the company direction you want your new leadership to go.

   Given the extremely limited pool of available talent, your industry presence is essential for the attractiveness of your business to others. Attending industry events is a great way to find the highly specialized workers your company requires to succeed. Alternately, executive recruitment agencies or executive search firms may be the best option because of their extensive and well-established network, they can find you a wider variety of candidates much more quickly.

Industry specific guides

Check out my industry specific guides where I go more into depth to answer each of these questions individually. Don’t see your industry? Make sure to contact me and I’ll see what I can do to help!