When I started JMA, my vision was to serve outstanding clients across consumer-facing industries. Thirteen years on, we’ve been fortunate enough to have built strong client relationships in almost every consumer ‘vertical’.
What I hadn’t foreseen was that, completely organically, we’d build up a cross-industry ‘horizontal’ specialism in the HR/People function.
Within our consumer-facing clients, HR mandates have historically represented 15% of what we do, so I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that when long-standing CEO, CHRO and CPO clients moved into non-consumer-facing sectors, they entrusted us with building their teams. As a result, we’ve recruited CPOs and VP-level HR generalist and CoE talent across technology, telecoms, media, financial services and industrials.
As we’re currently recruiting for a number of exciting HR roles across the US, Europe and Asia, I’ve been thinking about why our ‘horizontal’ HR specialism works so well for clients, candidates and us.
HR Talent is Found Across Industries
Looking for talent in competitors can be the right approach, but when it comes to HR appointments it can restrict the talent pool unnecessarily.
Today’s senior HR leaders face a multitude of challenges, from organisational transformation, AI, digital transformation and HRIS, to culture change, total rewards, talent management and leadership development. Very few of these belong to one industry.
From an HR perspective, a company employing 50,000 people across 50+ countries will often have far more in common with a similar-sized organisation in an adjacent or parallel sector than with a smaller or less global competitor in the same industry.
When recruiting for HR talent, the question therefore becomes less: “Who has done this job in our client’s industry?” and more: “Who has successfully solved the problems our client is facing?”
Different Industries Train Different Muscles
Different industries, meanwhile, have become adept at solving different HR challenges: consumer businesses understand frontline engagement and distributed workforces; technology businesses are at the forefront of AI, digital talent and scarce-skills challenges; financial services are sophisticated when it comes to governance, reward and regulation; industrials understand complex global workforces, labour relations and large-scale transformation.
Moving talent between these sectors introduces ideas that may not exist within a client’s traditional competitor set. Recruiting someone who has spent the last five years solving problems only just arriving in another industry can be enormously valuable.
The Challenges of Transferability
None of this means sector experience is irrelevant, and a cross-industry shortlist isn’t better simply because it’s imaginative. Scale, complexity, pace and culture all need to dovetail. The hard part is understanding which elements are genuinely transferable.
For HR roles in particular, there’s another important consideration: the standing of HR within the organisation. In some companies, HR is genuinely expected to operate as a strategic business partner; in others, it remains more of a service function. Finding someone who will thrive in the former means knowing which companies, across different industries, give their HR leaders a real seat at the table.
Cross-industry search isn’t about casting the net everywhere; it’s knowing which sectors and companies within them have solved certain problems, and which organisations develop the kind of HR leaders your client actually needs. This is why we ask questions such as: Has someone led a large-scale transformation? Have they worked at the cutting edge of ML/AI? Have they built something rather than simply inherited it?
A Broader Market Produces Richer Shortlists
To state the obvious, there’s also simple math(s) involved: exceptional senior HR executives are relatively scarce, and many of them are (rightly) wedded to their current employer. Restrict the search to one industry or geography, and the pool shrinks rapidly.
If you’re already one of the best companies in your industry, looking only at your direct competitors may not make you any better. The more interesting benchmark becomes the best companies of comparable scale and complexity anywhere: who is doing something exceptional, and who are the HR leaders helping them do it?
That opens up access to outstanding people who might never appear in a conventional sector search. A broader approach also gives clients genuinely different choices rather than five variations of the same career. Even if the eventual appointment comes from the client’s own sector, the new hire has truly been benchmarked against the best of the wider market.
The Benefits for Candidates
Senior HR executives who spend a large portion of their career in one industry can become pigeonholed, not least by unimaginative headhunters! Spend ten years in technology and every opportunity you hear about is in tech. Spend a decade in banking and every approach is in FS.
We can have a different conversation: we focus on the capabilities candidates have built, understand where they are valued, what experiences could be missing, and whether moving sectors could make someone a stronger future CHRO.
Some of the most interesting careers are built by taking expertise from an outstanding organisation and proving it works in an another equally strong organisation in a different industry. For candidates, that doesn’t just mean access to more opportunities, but a gateway to a richer career.
There’s another benefit: every cross-industry HR search we conduct gives us better intelligence on structures, compensation, capabilities and where genuinely interesting things are happening. We share this learning as freely with candidates as we do with clients.
The Benefits for Us
In the same way that working globally across consumer ‘verticals’ with multinationals has given us the broadest of contexts and the highest of talent benchmarks, our ‘horizontal’ HR specialism makes us more knowledgeable, more expert headhunters in the field of HR.
To deliver for clients outside the consumer sector, we have to understand which industries share the same organisational challenges and develop particular capabilities, and which companies among them house the best talent.
At the beginning of every search, we start with the client’s problem and ask: “In which industries have organisations already solved what our client needs to?”
When recruiting for exceptional HR talent, I believe this leads to a better outcome.