When a California manufacturer’s HR director retired after two decades in the role, the company needed a successor who could take over a fully built function and keep it going. Keller hired a local HR professional who showed up two weeks early.
The Client
The company is a family-owned custom cabinetry manufacturer based in Brentwood, California, with more than 200 employees in its manufacturing, delivery, and installation operations. The company has been in business for close to 30 years, serving residential and commercial markets in the Greater Bay Area, Sacramento, and wine country. The workforce consists of both exempt staff and non-exempt production and installation workers, a mix that places certain demands on HR compliance, compensation administration, and workforce management in a Californian manufacturing setting.
The Challenge
The company’s HR director had been at the job for 20 years. She designed the HR infrastructure, built the team, managed California compliance throughout the company’s entire growth period, and has been the company’s sole HR leadership presence since its early years. Her retirement was a simple milestone, but the handover it entailed was not. Whoever came in would be inheriting two decades of policy, practice and institutional knowledge.
It was a succession hire brief, not a backfill. The company was in search of a manager-level individual who could immediately step into the function and grow into the director position over time. The position was fully on-site, local candidates were strongly preferred, and the planned start in January would allow a two-month overlap period with the retiring director that the company planned to leverage fully.
The Solution
Candidate criteria were directly related to the role. These included depth of HR generalist experience across an exempt and non-exempt workforce, OSHA and safety compliance in a manufacturing environment, labor relations experience, California employment law, and talent acquisition. We leveraged the NPA partner network with direct sourcing to increase coverage of the local and East Bay candidate market.
The Results
Keller placed a PHR-certified HR professional who has nearly 20 years of experience, most of it in manufacturing and industrial environments. She has served in senior human resources roles at a Fortune 100 energy distribution company and a defense and aerospace manufacturer with over $26 billion in annual revenue, where she oversaw labor relations for IBEW-represented employees, designed compensation programs for large production workforces, and led human resources operations across multiple locations. She is based in Brentwood and cited the on-site requirement and location as the main reasons for her interest.
The company got more working overlap with the departing director by having her in place two weeks ahead of the January target.
The Impact
The transition was a seamless experience for both the workforce and the HR function. The early start meant the retiring director had time to properly wind up her tenure and gave the new HR Manager the working time she required to soak up the history of a position that had been held by one person for 20 years.
Six months later, the company added a second engagement for Keller. They needed a Director of Production Sales. The HR Manager who had been placed in the first search was now managing the process from the client side.
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