Happy Wednesday to everyone tuning in to today’s episode of The Hirewell Update. I’m your host, Ryan Brown, Vice President of our Corporate Functions team, and this is my co host. I’m Emily Goor, director on our go to market recruiting team. The Hirewell Update is a weekly show that covers the latest talent insights, monthly placement overviews, talent solutions, and the hottest jobs we’re working on.
All brought to you by us, your market experts here at Hirewell. Before we kick off the show, you can find all of our content at talentinsights.hirewell.com or if you’d like to learn more about Hirewell, our service offerings, check out our website, www.hirewell.com.
We were chatting earlier about a couple of high level searches that we’ve been working on right now.
I’m working on the VP of HR and I know you’re working on a president role. And while the two roles are obviously very different based off of what we focus on, they do have something in common. They’re both at companies that are backed by private equity firms. Yeah, I know we were talking about that and kind of trying to like tie the two roles together, but it’s true.
They are both backed by private equity firms, the companies that we’re working with on these searches. But these are definitely not the only roles that we’re working on for PE backed companies. I know Hirewell’s always, always been industry agnostic. We continue to be. That is not changing. But I would say over the years, Hirewell has definitely carved out kind of a niche working with portfolio companies of private equity firms and venture capital firms.
Like we’ve seen a lot of that recently. And I’d say like sometimes the relationship comes at the portco level. And in a lot of cases as I think is the case, for like both of the roles maybe we’re working on. I know the one that I’m working on, we are working actually directly with the PE or VC firm.
Yeah. Same for me as well. You’re right. I think across all of the relationships we have here at Hirewell that have some sort of PE or VC tie, we can tell a story for both of those scenarios that you just mentioned. And I think what’s important to mention about our relationship with portcos or private equity companies, as well as how we work with them.
We talked about this a while ago in terms of how Hirewell provides services and what it looks like. Every scenario is advisory. Like what we’re doing is helping to make really intentional, thoughtful, strategic decisions around talent. But there’s three different ways we can do that.
One is RPO, which is basically a very heavy lift or a build out of a specific function for a company. We have done that countless times with organizations that are either a spinoff or family owned and now moving into a new space with private equity backing and we have to do a pretty significant build in specific departments, or sometimes it’s across the organization.
In the cases of the two roles that you and I are working on right now, we’re doing one off executive level searches. So that one and done type of search function, hopefully more to come after that, but you know, that’s, that’s the space we’re sitting in. And then of course, interim, sometimes these organizations need some support as they’re going through high growth or help with integrations from some of the mergers and acquisitions that are happening, or maybe they just need an interim resource as they figure out what their next step looks like. Yeah. And we’ve now mentioned these two searches a couple of times, like you mentioned, they do fall under kind of our one off search bucket.
That’s not always exact level. I think in these cases, these are higher level roles, which is kind of cool because frequently, and it goes in both directions. Sometimes we’re building teams from the bottom and then we end up knowing the organization so well that we can so easily act as an extension of our clients, internal talent acquisition team and hire those higher level roles.
Higher, the higher level roles. Yeah, but I think in a lot of the cases, it’s really great because we start, we hire the high level roles and then we get to actually work with the people that we hire and helping to build out the teams underneath them. So I know, like I said, we’ve mentioned these 2 higher level roles a couple times.
So. We might as well get into them. I think you mentioned yours is a VP of HR that you’re working on. Yeah, exactly. It’s a VP of HR position with an eyewear company that was acquired by a private equity firm in 2023, so last year. Sitting right around 200 employees currently with a healthy pipeline of M&A activity to come.
So growth organically and also through M&A, which is great. But for 30, 40 years, this has been a family owned and operated business. And so being in the space now where they’re private equity backed, the organization’s going through some pretty massive change. They’re evolving from family owned into the PE backing.
So, that’s where the VP of HR comes in as the first true leader , from a people standpoint, not going to be surprising, but this will be an incredibly visible position reporting directly into the C suite partnering closely with the board of directors and of course, with a private equity firm. This company I think is really invested in people and talent.
And so they’re going to lean very heavily on this individual to help them preserve all of the wonderful parts of this family culture, but also help them usher into a new era adapt with change and make that evolution. So when we think about the right profile for this role, it is certainly someone that has experience building HR from the ground up.
Strong M&A experience with due diligence, with integrations, and developing a playbook for HR strategy to keep up with the business’s growth. I think it would be highly preferred if someone has sat in this seat previously taking that family owned business, understanding the relationship with the PE side, you know, there’s some uniqueness to navigating those things.
So having that experience and coming into the role, I think would be. Important. But initial priorities in terms of like, you know, the first six months to a year will include lots of change management, talent assessment, some job leveling, org design, obviously building up policies and procedures from a people perspective, but also one’s team and then that integration piece with the M&A activity.
So I think this is an incredible opportunity for someone to get in, really build something very incredible with some. really unique support coming from the leadership team, from the private equity team, and from the board. So it’s an exciting opportunity to build from the ground up. I don’t know if I missed, did you mention where this is located?
Just in case, I know we’re talking about how we work with PE backed and VC backed companies, but maybe some candidates are watching. Totally. Yeah, This is going to be in the suburbs of Chicago. So Chicagoland, like Northern burbs, preferably, we might have a little bit of flexibility for the right person, but this is definitely more of an onsite type of a role, especially when we’re thinking about how important bringing the organization is into this new era and how important preserving the culture is having someone on site is going to feel like a really good fit. It’s actually so interesting because this is a live show, so it’s not like we’ve rehearsed this and I’ve heard you describe this job before.
It is really interesting how similar the jobs are, even though they’re completely different roles, different skill sets. I’m, I’m sure I can’t wait to hear about yours. I know I obviously just chatted for a while. I feel like I have this goal memorized from the inside out at this point, but tell me a bit about the role you’re working on.
No, it was great to hear about it. I think some of the similarities- so, I mean, this company has been around like software dev, app dev company, so providing IT services and they’ve been around for about 20 years. Founder led, so founders still involved. They took on funding for two PE firms in like November, so late 2023, and ready for growth.
So, really exciting time, I would say, they’re looking for a president, kind of think like CEO ish, if you will. So the founder is the CEO currently, and you would be working really, really closely with the founder and potential to grow into a CEO for this president that we bring on. I would say they’ve done an incredible job of creating a lot of systems. Like the operation side is super, super solid where I think they want this like president to kind of lean a little bit more heavily with their skills would probably be with outbound sales and marketing. So looking, and it’s funny because I was kind of like laughing a lot of the things you mentioned. I was like, Oh, that’s, that’s really similar. You mentioned like, some M&A and organic growth, I’d say for this role, more focused on organic growth, probably looking to like double or triple in revenue in the next, in the next like four to five years, mostly through organic growth.
But, Maybe a couple, two to three little add ons here and there. I’m trying to think of what else I could share. You went into such great detail. Where is this one located? Yeah, that’s a very good question. This one’s located in Columbus, Ohio. A lot of what you described in terms of maintaining the culture.
I just kept giggling. This is like the same thing here. I think that’s really important, right? And we see that actually a lot with some of these PE backed companies that we work with that, they’ve taken on PE backing, or, you know, from venture capital and they’re in growth mode, right?
If they’re taking it on, they’re like probably in growth mode as these companies that we mentioned are, but they are looking for someone who can come in and also maintain That culture, right? And I know that’s really important for this particular role. It’s a Midwest company. It’s a pretty small company.
There’s only about 30 people, but they definitely hit above their weight weight class when it comes to projects they take on. Like it’s a 30 person company probably taking on projects that like a 200 plus agency would take on. And it’s not just like staff all getting butts in seats. They’re really getting Into the day to day with clients, doing deep discovery.
Acting as like consultants before they build out these projects. So really exciting opportunity. I would say the ideally want somebody in Columbus, but if not in Columbus and the ability to be in Columbus, probably around like a week to week and a half out of the month.
All right. Yeah. Well, that sounds like a great role. I think, one of the things that makes me super excited when we’re partnering with private equity organizations and their portcos is oftentimes what interests a PE organization to invest in a company is the work that they’re doing.
And so if there’s interest from that sensors, Oftentimes, a lot of interest in maintaining some of the things that keep employees incredibly loyal to organizations for a long time, which is exciting. And I know that’s definitely the case with the role I’m working on. It sounds like it’s very much the case for the role you’re working on too.
So I think that says a ton about the clients that we’re partnering with, but also the PE and VC space in some capacities as well. I couldn’t agree more. And it’s actually, it’s always a question that we ask clients. Sometimes we get involved at the portco level, and sometimes we are more so working with the PE company or the venture capital company.
And it’s always a question that I ask, you know, I asked this client , what interested you in investing? So I think that’s a really, really good point and something that’s sort of fun about working sometimes, directly with the PE firms themselves. Definitely.
Yeah. You get a unique lens to things and you know, their decision making behind that type of partnership is always interesting to learn about. Well, I’m excited about both of these roles. They sound incredible. I can’t wait to see who we eventually place in these positions. It’s going to be awesome.
And I know both folks will be very deserving of the positions. I guess we should maybe just wrap things up here a little bit. I think number one, if folks are interested in either of these roles, reach out to myself, reach out to Emily, we’re obviously happy to chat. And secondly, we have expertise in supporting both PE companies and their portcos, which, we’ve highlighted today.
So if you are a viewer falling into either category, reach out to us. We have specializations in these areas. We have done this type of work time and time and time again, we have plenty of case studies that we can share, clients that would be happy to give referrals. And obviously a very long list of folks we’ve supported and we’re certainly continuing to grow in this space. So I’m excited, by the end of the year, I’d love to maybe do a bit of a recap and see what our PE focus was at the beginning of the year, those relationships, the clients or placements, and see where we end at the end of the year. And just like that growth in general.
I agree. I think that would be really interesting. Well, that’s all I’ve got today. Anything else? Should I take us home? Take us home. Beautiful. Well, that is a wrap for this week’s episode of a Hirewell Update.
Thank you all so much for joining us. As a reminder, you can find all of our content at talentinsights.hirewell.com or if you’d like to learn more about Hirewell and our service offerings, I know we just shared a lot, but you can check out our website. That’s www.hirewell.com. And we’ll be back next Wednesday around noon central.
We’ll see y’all then. Thanks everyone. Have a great week.
