Role Overview
A global, publicly traded industrial technology organization is seeking a Vice President of Human Resources to lead the people strategy for its Americas business during a period of exceptional organic and inorganic growth. The organization serves mission-critical markets through a broad portfolio of engineered products, technology-enabled solutions, manufacturing operations, and field services.
This executive will be the senior HR leader for a large, multi-country employee population and a substantial regional HR organization spanning the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Latin America. The scope includes numerous manufacturing and assembly locations, an extensive service-center network, and customer-facing operations.
The position operates in a dual-reporting structure: functionally to the CHRO and as the primary day-to-day HR partner to the Americas Business President. The successful candidate must enter with the executive presence, commercial judgment, and enterprise capability to be considered a credible future successor to the CHRO.
The Leadership Mandate
The VP of HR will act first as a business leader, applying deep financial literacy and human capital expertise to accelerate growth, strengthen margins, increase organizational capacity, and improve execution. The role requires a highly stratactical leader who can establish a three-year vision, make disciplined choices about what not to pursue, translate strategy into action, identify execution problems, and pivot quickly as conditions change.
Success will depend on becoming deeply embedded in the business. This leader must proactively earn access, understand customers and operations firsthand, build trusted relationships with a small group of critical decision-makers, and match the urgency of an organization experiencing rapid change.
First-Year Priorities
- Enable aggressive organic and inorganic growth by aligning organization design, leadership capability, workforce capacity, and talent strategy with business expansion.
- Support expansion and optimization of the manufacturing footprint, ensuring locations have the leadership, skills, workforce plans, and HR infrastructure required to perform.
- Assess and strengthen the Americas HR organization, upskill existing leaders, and make timely talent changes where capabilities do not meet future business requirements.
- Build workforce capability plans that include critical-role coverage, skills and training matrices, and analysis of work and roles that can be automated to improve capacity, productivity, and margin.
- Advance succession readiness for the Americas President, CHRO, and other pivotal leadership roles, preparing the organization to support leadership transitions successfully.
- Establish exceptional HR data quality, controls, and decision-ready analytics that connect people investments to ROI, opportunity cost, productivity, margin, and organizational performance.
- Become fully immersed in the business by visiting facilities and customer environments, participating in service calls, and learning the products, P&L, competition, and operating realities firsthand.
- Earn credibility as a candid executive coach and influential global HR leader who advances business performance, develops talent across the enterprise, and communicates effectively with senior executives and the Board.
Key Responsibilities
Business and Financial Partnership
- Serve as a strategic advisor to the Americas Business President, CHRO, and regional executive leadership team.
- Use financial, operational, market, and workforce data to frame decisions in terms of ROI, opportunity cost, productivity, margin, risk, and business value.
- Anticipate the organizational implications of growth, including capacity constraints, leadership gaps, cultural dilution, and execution risk.
Strategy, Organization Design, and Change
- Develop and execute a focused three-year people and organization strategy aligned with enterprise and regional priorities.
- Lead organization design, restructuring, integration, and scaling initiatives across manufacturing, services, commercial, and support functions.
- Build organizational agility by piloting solutions, learning quickly, and adjusting course without losing momentum.
Workforce Planning and Talent
- Create scalable workforce models that flex with demand, capacity expansion, new-market entry, acquisitions, and evolving skill requirements.
- Strengthen succession pipelines and leadership bench depth for critical regional and enterprise roles.
- Partner with Talent Acquisition and business leaders to attract and retain high-caliber talent in competitive and hard-to-fill markets.
Executive Coaching and Leadership Development
- Provide candid, high-trust executive coaching that strengthens leadership judgment, resilience, accountability, and decision speed.
- Deliver healthy, well-timed pushback privately while remaining a strong listener who knows when to lead and when to elevate others.
- Develop leaders who can operate effectively through ambiguity, scale teams quickly, and deliver results under pressure.
HR Team Leadership
- Lead and develop a large, geographically dispersed HR organization supporting the Americas business.
- Set clear standards, strengthen capability, clarify accountability, and ensure the HR team operates with speed, credibility, and commercial discipline.
- Contribute actively to the global HR Leadership Team and help advance talent and careers across the enterprise.
Culture and Engagement
- Reinforce a high-performance, customer-focused culture characterized by accountability, urgency, continuous improvement, learning, and strong execution.
- Monitor organizational health and engagement during rapid hiring, integration, leadership transition, and business transformation.
Analytics and Decision Support
- Establish disciplined data governance, controls, dashboards, and predictive insights for talent, retention, performance, productivity, and organizational risk.
- Distill complex information into concise, actionable executive messages and recommendations.
Candidate Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in human resources, business, finance, organizational leadership, or a related field; an advanced degree is preferred.
- Approximately 15 or more years of progressive HR leadership experience, including senior responsibility for a large, complex, multi-country business or region.
- Demonstrated success partnering with a multibillion-dollar P&L and translating human capital decisions into measurable financial and operational outcomes.
- Experience supporting sizeable manufacturing, field-service, engineering, supply-chain, or other operationally intensive employee populations.
- Track record of leading through rapid growth, capacity expansion, transformation, M&A integration, restructuring, or significant organizational change.
- Proven ability to assess, upgrade, and develop a senior HR team while building strong succession and leadership pipelines.
- Advanced capability in strategic workforce planning, organization design, executive coaching, change leadership, and people analytics.
- Experience presenting to C-suite executives and creating concise, decision-ready materials for boards or board committees.
- Strong understanding of employment law, labor and employee relations, compliance, and risk across multiple states and countries.
- Willingness to work onsite five days per week and travel approximately 20%-30%, primarily within the United States and Mexico.
Leadership Profile
The ideal candidate is commercially and financially astute, data-driven, resilient, emotionally intelligent, and comfortable with ambiguity. This person combines strategic vision with operational execution; acts with urgency; builds relationships proactively; challenges constructively; listens carefully; develops and upgrades talent; and knows when to step forward, when to influence from behind the scenes, and when to let others shine.