Head of Technical – Animal Feeds Company

IRC Global Executive Search Partner

HR Partners, IRC Global Executive Search Partner - China / Taiwan / Singapore

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Head of Technical (Preferred to be based in Bangkok, Thailand)

Client/industry

Animal Feeds Industry Company

Situation

Our client is one of the renowned and established multinational companies in this industry operating across 10 countries in Asia Pacific.
This search has been on-going internally within the company for some time before client engaged our services for this position. As it is relatively niche industry, most available talents would have been either surfaced or spoken to by the client before the decision to engage external search firm. The challenge is to search deeper into the available talent pool to produce candidates and calibrate against candidates they know.
This is a newly created role within the Asia Pacific function. Commissioned by the existing Sales Director for Asia Pacific, the incumbent will report directly to the Sales Director, whom himself used to be in charge of this technical team of 7 subordinates (regional nutritionists based in various countries). This newly created Head of Technical role will now be heading this regional technical team. The selected candidates should therefore come with proven technical reputations and people management skills to be able to handle the transit of leadership from the existing Sales Director and to lead the cross-countries technical teams effectively.
As this industry is relatively niche, we have to conduct this search on complete confidentiality to protect the client in the market regionally, especially since they have many clients and suppliers where good potential talents are. Our proper procedure is to disclose the client’s identity only prior to the interviewing stage.
As this role is a key function in enhancing business growing at 3- 5 times per year for the past years in this region, all eyes are on the fulfillment of the position.

Assessment

The animal feed industry is one of a highly competitive nature. Technical team traditionally plays a fundamental critical role in its successful delivery of value adding services such as nutrition management aspect to ensure business growth. As some of their clients are also existing suppliers and co-partners, we have to be extra sensitive not to approach these companies during the search too. The Head of Technical incumbent needs to be someone of good reputation in this region within the industry, with proven records and strong industry network. Someone with a high drive and possessing the maturity to manage subordinates of different cultural background is preferred.

Challenge

This role is preferably to be based in Bangkok, Thailand. The search was initiated first in Thailand with the preference of a non-Thai nationality candidate to balance the nationality equity within the team structure. This posed to be a great challenge due to the following market conditions faced currently in this industry in Thailand:
•    Good talents have very strong loyalty to their current company
•    Budget constraints
•    Lack of non-Thai talents in the market

As a result, we expanded the search ground to include alternate countries such as Singapore and Malaysia. In addition, we were working on a very tight compensation budget for this position.

Methodology/Solution

The search was kicked off to focus more on Thailand to facilitate the position to be based in Bangkok. However as expatriate talent pool is limited, coupled with a limited budget, we also search out of Singapore, Malaysia and other Asia countries to collect ground data during the first week of search. Recommendations were given to clients on the ideal countries to focus on outside Thailand.
We subsequently identified Singapore and Malaysia as the alternate pool of talents to focus on. Some MNCs have their regional HQ based in Singapore. Malaysia serves as another alternate pool with a bigger home market for this industry. We also collected market information such as Malaysian candidates tend to be more open to relocation, and Singaporean candidates have higher remuneration in general due to wider coverage of markets in their portfolio.
For the Thailand pool, we also managed to identify good Thai candidates with exceptionally good communication, track record and drive.

Candidate

We subsequently identified and presented 4 candidates to the client. This included an Australian based in Singapore, a Canadian based in Thailand, a German based in Thailand and a native Thai. All candidates come with the required market experiences, both technically and commercially, coupled with cross-cultural people management, proven industry records as well as the necessary soft skills.

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