The Challenge
After 13 years of tremendous success as a founder-led technology company providing software platforms dedicated to the staffing industry, Avionte went through ownership transition to Private Equity. With a newly appointed C-Level staff in place, and renewed energy for driving exponential growth, the next step was to layer in “succession plan” leadership talent at the Director level both in Human Resources and in Sales. With unemployment at an all-time low, particularly within the start-up technology community, Avionte turned to our team to identify impactful leadership talent for these two critical functions of their business.
Our Approach
Companies transitioning from long-term founder ownership to Private Equity ownership face many unique challenges mainly around organizational culture and identity. We spent hours on site with the Avionte team on several separate occasions to fully understand the impact these changes were having on the company and to identify the short and long-term goals of the firm’s new leadership team. Avionte had already grown tremendously from a start-up to a $20M company, but new ownership was interested in driving the next major step in the company’s maturation and expansion. This required hiring a Director of HR with the capability to work extremely well in the “grey zone” as the company started to build processes and protocols around comp and benefits, HR technology systems, talent acquisition, and leadership development. We spent several days in research compiling a prospect chart of up-and-coming HR leaders with strong experience at small to mid-market technology companies, targeting SaaS product companies between $30M - $200M in annual revenue. We spent our final research day carefully constructing our approach to sharing the Avionte story in a highly compelling, yet transparent way knowing this would lead to an excited and fully informed newly appointed Director of HR.
The Results
Roughly 3 weeks after beginning our outreach process, we formally presented Avionte’s leadership team with a narrowed pool of 8 top candidates. 5 were selected for first round interviews, and 2 were considered “standouts” who were interviewed in final rounds. Avionte’s top selection was made an offer, which was accepted, and their new Director of HR started 3 weeks later.
