Building the HR Function Before the Company Outgrows Itself

Personal care is a category that has a subtle but pervasive impact on everyday life and the companies behind it are more operationally complex than they appear from the outside. This US-based manufacturer has been manufacturing absorbent hygiene products for adult incontinence, baby care, and clinical applications for more than 70 years, building a portfolio of more than 50 brands in the North American and European markets. The manufacturing sites on both continents serve both trade and direct-to-consumer channels. Some 2,000 employees are split roughly evenly across both regions.

In 2021, the company was acquired by a private equity group, this acquisition removed the client from a much larger publicly owned corporate structure. The aim was to reboot the business with a mandate to stabilize the operation, run lean, and show value. Four years into that ownership, the business has moved beyond stabilization. The new CEO was pushing for real succession-planning infrastructure and the kind of talent architecture that would hold up when the business was sold. Workday was being implemented as a cornerstone of that architecture. To realize that ambition, the HR function, which had been run with a high degree of reliance on its most senior leader, needed to build out a layer beneath her.

Three roles opening at the same time were not planned. Two openings were created because long-time team members found opportunities outside the business in a short time frame, and the third was a new leadership layer designed to provide the HR coverage that the senior vice president had previously carried alone. The requirements for each role were specific enough to greatly reduce the talent pool.

The Director of NA Human Resources role was newly created. The three plant HR managers reported directly to the SVP, but the incoming Director would take over that management layer and also serve as a corporate HR partner. That combination of real, plant-level manufacturing skill with corporate organizational development ability proved to be rare in practice. Candidates who had built careers close to the production floor generally lacked the corporate policy and strategic exposure the role required. The ones who came from strong corporate backgrounds rarely had enough exposure to the operational realities of a multi-site manufacturing environment to credibly manage plant HR managers.

The Global Talent position had been restructured and not replaced. The new Director would own the implementation of Workday and the talent architecture that sits under it; a succession planning cycle, a company-wide talent review process, and a learning management platform. None of these were inherited structures; they all had to be built or formalized. The Compensation and Analytics Manager was a different sort of challenge. The previous incumbent combined compensation administration with employee relations work, and these duties have been purposefully separated since then. What was left was a position that merged compensation administration with HR analytics and data management, a combination that falls outside the typical comp-and-benefits profile that most practitioners have built their careers around. This hampered the process of defining the candidate universe.

All three searches were run simultaneously, all reported to the same hiring manager, and Workday experience was a common requirement on each brief as the company moved toward implementation. Furthermore, the SVP’s preference at the beginning of the engagement had been that all three new leaders start on the same day.

Each of the three searches had a cultural filter running underneath. The company came from a much larger publicly owned organization, and the difference in that environment versus a lean PE-owned business with few processes in place showed consistently in early assessment. Some candidates with careers in structured corporate environments had difficulty with the expectation that systems would be built, not handed over. Being able to identify that difference early on guided the process to people who could work without established scaffolding, versus finding the mismatch at the onsite stage.

For the Director NA HR role, the targeted sourcing process focused on professionals with proven experience in managing plant-level and corporate-level HR at the same time. We had three candidates make it onsite and have multiple interviews with the SVP and the CFO. The initial offer was accepted, and a start date was agreed. The candidate withdrew weeks before that date, citing a family medical emergency. The search was taken up again at once. A second finalist was identified and taken through the remaining steps of the process with a confirmed start on 22 September 2025.

As the final assessment phase in the Global Talent search process, the two short-listed candidates developed a presentation on designing succession planning and career development. The preferred candidate was identified following that stage. When the offer came through at the Associate Director level, she made it clear that the compensation and title were not adequate compared with the scope of the role. The client promoted the title to Director, and changed the base and bonus accordingly. The revised offer was accepted and a start date confirmed for May 2025.

We had to look outside of the immediate geography in order to complete sourcing for the Compensation and Analytics Manager search. The talent pool was intentionally narrow, as the blend of compensation and analytics is uncommon without the addition of benefits administration. The appointment was confirmed following a multi-stage interview process for the preferred candidate.

All three positions were filled within a seven month recruitment process. The Director of Global Talent was appointed at a base of $165,000 on 22 May 2025. The timeline was pushed out as the first confirmed appointment pulled out and a restart was needed. The Director of NA Human Resources commenced on 22 September 2025. The appointment of the Global Compensation Systems and Analytics Manager completed the full brief, with all three searches completed under Keller Executive Search’s exclusive engagement.

The effort involved three active senior searches, all at the same time, two of which required designing the role rather than replicating a predecessor, and one of which required a complete restart after a signed offer fell through. The three roles were confirmed in one engagement period.