Turnaround

Our mission:

A major public software company emerging from a difficult period during which the company was required to make substantive changes to its financial control and administrative processes while operating under a "Deferred Prosecution Agreement" it entered into to avoid federal prosecution. An entirely new senior management team was brought on to engineer the turn-around effort. Our mandate was to assist in the recruitment of a Global Head of Tax.

The challenge was to craft a "message" to the market place that would serve to attract the individuals with the skills and abilities to become a part of the company's turnaround story. The sourcing and recruitment effort required the ability to overcome the negative publicity associated with the client and effectively communicate the new management team's vision for the future

Although the tax department was relatively large (18 professionals) it wasn't considered to functioning as true partner to the business and needed redirection from a leadership point of view. The difficulty was to find someone with the right "fit". The individual needed to have the maturity and skills to lead the department but would also need to believe the move to our client was a move forward for his/her career.

Results:

We recruited a highly qualified individual (JD, LLM, CPA) from a much larger enterprise where he had served as a divisional VP of Tax supervising a small team and was currently in a staff role. The chance to run a department was enough of an attraction to overcome the risk associated with joining a company emerging from a troubled past. Although the successful candidate hadn't had the experience of running a big tax department, he demonstrated (during the course of the recruitment process) the skills required to be successful.