For decades this company made hardware — some of the most respected audio hardware in the world. Then the products changed. A second-generation platform arrived: devices, a mobile application, and cloud services, built from the ground up, with authenticated registration and serious security weight behind it. Software stopped being the thing that made the hardware work and became half the product. The software organization was nearly two hundred people, spread across Chicago, Toronto, and the West Coast, mixing internal staff with external partners, onshore and offshore. Its leadership bench, in the words of the executive running it, was this deep: "It's not like there are seven software directors and everybody is competing for the next spot. There's not a lot of us. There's two."
The brief
The brief he gave us was unusually honest about what the job was not. Nobody was getting a clean slate: "You're not going to come in here and build up this whole new thing. We've got a lot of people. They need to be managed." The platform did not need inventing; it needed to be taken from where it was to where it had to go — point B to point C, in his phrase. "Creators and evolvers are different people." His test for candidates followed from it: when did you see something that needed to be done differently, and how did you manage to change it? He wanted people with opinions — who could articulate them, and change a room's direction.
In 2021 we placed the three directors who rebuilt that bench.
Creators and evolvers are different people.
The rebuild
In 2022 the chair at the top changed, and the mandate for the successor was the transformation itself: pull all of the company's product software — embedded, mobile, cloud platforms, shared services — under one leader, and finish making software a value creator in its own right rather than hardware's supporting act. The teams he inherited were at different levels of maturity and had not yet come together; the first job, the search notes say plainly, was to pull them together. We placed the vice president of global software delivery. Within a year he was our client: his name is on the agreements for the searches that followed, and the scorecard for the 2023 senior director search was written around his tests for a leader — empathy, patience, a strong sense of ownership; delivery that is never in the red; a humble leader hungry for a career-defining moment.
Nor was the work confined to one corner of the company. We staffed the quality organization as it built out a leadership layer of its own — a senior director search in 2023, a director search the following year. We staffed automotive engineering as the car became a software product in its own right: a software architecture manager for the automotive group, program leadership for automotive software. Function by function, the pattern repeated — the bench was thin, and the standard was the client's own.
The searches kept coming: senior directors in 2023; three more retained director searches signed on a single day in July 2024 — platform, embedded consumer software, software quality; another senior-director search under way as 2025 opened. The relationship is fifteen years old now.
- ~200People in the software organization
- 3Directors placed in 2021
- 15Years in the relationship
Counsel, not just recruiters
And the searches were only the visible part of the engagement. Across those years we worked with the company's leadership as counsel, not just as recruiters — on how engineering hiring should be run, and on the longer question underneath every requisition: what talent, in what order, does a hardware company need in order to become a software company? The scorecards, the interview instruments, the definitions of what a leader here had to be — we helped write them. The retained searches were where that thinking landed. The thinking came first.
Run on the Playbook
None of it ran on improvisation, either. The engagement ran on our Inbound Recruitment Playbook — the seven-step process behind every search we take: plan, attract, evaluate, interview, deliver, hire, retain. It is why the standard set in one year's calibration was still the standard on the next year's scorecard, and why the client could sign three searches in a single day and know exactly how each would be run.
The transformation
What the client itself credits to those leadership groups, across functions, is the transformation: stronger profitability, entry into markets the company had not competed in, products delivered at a noticeably higher quality, and a discipline its engineers call platforming — technology built once, properly, and reused across product lines instead of rebuilt for each one.
Companies in the middle of a change like that usually hire for the company they used to be. This one hired for what it was becoming. That is rarer than it sounds, and it is most of why the story worked.