Background: a manufacturer's digital transformation dilemma
A mid-sized manufacturer of precision components, with annual revenue of about RMB 2 billion, holds a solid position in its industry. In recent years, as labour costs rose and downstream customers raised their expectations for intelligent production, the company launched a digital transformation strategy. Its aim was to achieve full digital upgrading of production, management and the supply chain over three to five years.
The company's first thought was simple: if digital transformation needs someone to drive it, hire a head of digital transformation. The HR department quickly issued a JD describing the role as leading company digital transformation, setting and executing the digital strategy, and leading the team to build and optimise business systems. The requirements were ten or more years of digital-related experience, a manufacturing background, prior team leadership, ideally from a large technology company.
After more than three months of recruitment and more than a dozen interviews, no suitable candidate had been found. Some candidates had strong technical skills but weak communication and could not connect with business departments. Others had rich management experience but limited understanding of manufacturing. Others looked adequate on every count, but the company still felt something was missing and could not say what.
HR came under heavy pressure. Business departments were pressing for someone to join, and the boss kept asking about progress, but the right person could not be found. Worse, views inside the company on the role had begun to diverge: the business departments thought it should be someone who understood the business and could drive change, IT thought it should be someone with strong technical skills who could build systems, and the boss wanted someone who could both deliver and follow instruction.
In this situation, the company turned to YUNLUE Consulting to help search for a head of digital transformation.
Diagnosis: not a shortage of candidates, but a role that had never been defined
Once involved, the YUNLUE team did not launch a search immediately. It began with a role diagnostic. Our consultants spent a week conducting in-depth interviews with the company's chairman, general manager, HR head, IT head and the heads of the main business departments to understand the state of the digital transformation, the history of the role and what each side expected of it.
Several core problems emerged.
First, the company's understanding of digital transformation was itself vague. The chairman spoke of a comprehensive digital upgrade, the business departments understood it as rolling out an ERP system, IT thought in terms of building a data platform, and HR saw it as hiring a head of technology. Everyone was talking about the same thing, but not at the same level. Without a clear transformation goal, the role could not be clearly defined either.
Second, the role's core tasks had never been defined. What was this role actually for? Was it to build systems or to drive business change? Was it to manage the IT team or to run cross-departmental transformation projects? Was it to report to the CEO, the CFO or the COO? On these basic questions there was no internal consensus. The business departments felt the role should drive business change; IT felt it should get systems built properly. The two sets of expectations were far apart.
Third, the picture of the candidate was a set of labels, not a portrait. From a large technology company, ten years of experience, has led a team, understands manufacturing: these are labels, not a portrait. Labels sound specific, but in real search you find that far too many people carry them, and that they differ enormously. Two people both described as a digital transformation head from a large tech company may have completely different capability profiles: one leans towards architecture, another towards business operations, a third towards project management. Searching by labels alone is like looking for a needle in a haystack when you do not yet know what the needle looks like.
On this basis, the YUNLUE team concluded that the project's first problem was not finding people but defining the role. If the role was not defined, no number of candidates would fit. We recommended that the company pause the search and spend one to two weeks getting the Job Portrait right.
What YUNLUE did: from interview alignment to Job Portrait rebuild
With the company's cooperation, the YUNLUE team began rebuilding the Job Portrait. This was not a one-way process of YUNLUE producing a document; it was a joint exercise of exploration and alignment with the company.
The first step was in-depth interviews and information gathering. We interviewed every key stakeholder connected to the role, including the chairman, general manager, business line heads, the IT head and the HR head. Every interview was structured around a set of core questions: what is the company's digital transformation goal? What core problem should this role solve? What is the biggest challenge facing the role? What do you expect this person to achieve within the first six months? What kind of person do you think suits this role?
The results confirmed our judgement: different people understood the same role very differently. The chairman focused on strategy execution and organisational change; business heads focused on whether systems could solve real business problems; the IT head focused on technical architecture and team management; HR focused on the compensation budget and how hard the role would be to fill. Each perspective had merit, but left unintegrated they would produce a blind-men-and-the-elephant situation.
The second step was aligning requirements and building consensus. Once the information was gathered, the YUNLUE team organised a Job Portrait workshop, bringing all the key stakeholders together, putting their different perspectives on the table and discussing and aligning them together.
Throughout, YUNLUE's consultants acted as facilitators and translators. We helped the group make vague requirements specific, rank conflicting requirements by priority and bring different vocabularies onto the same wavelength. When the chairman said the person must be able to drive change, we asked: which change? Where would resistance come from? What capabilities would be needed to drive it? When a business head said the person must understand the business, we asked: to what extent? Is it understanding production processes or understanding supply chain logic? Is it enough to understand the business, or must the person be able to design a business model?
After two workshops and several one-to-one conversations, the company at last reached a basic consensus: this was neither purely a technical role nor purely a management role, but a driver and implementer of digital transformation. The person needs to understand technology but need not be a technology expert; needs to understand the business but need not be a business expert. The core capability is to act as a bridge between technology and the business, and drive cross-departmental change and collaboration.
The third step was a structured Job Portrait output. On the basis of this consensus, the YUNLUE team produced a structured Job Portrait document covering six core dimensions:
- Strategic mission: take forward the company's digital transformation strategy, own the development and delivery of the transformation plan, and drive the digital upgrade of its business and management models.
- Business objectives: launch and optimise the core business systems within one year, achieve full digitalisation of production, the supply chain and management within three years, and raise operational efficiency by more than 20%.
- Organisational relationships: report to the general manager, manage an in-house IT team of around 10 people, and coordinate horizontally with production, sales, procurement, finance and other business departments.
- Key challenges: first, uneven understanding of digitalisation across business departments and strong resistance to change; second, weak underlying data at the company, which makes system building difficult; third, the capability of the in-house IT team needs raising, which requires a leader who can develop people.
- Capability requirements: essential capabilities are business understanding, project management, cross-departmental communication and team management; desirable capabilities are manufacturing digitalisation experience and experience building data platforms.
- Stage fit: the company is at an early stage of digital transformation (the 0-to-1 stage) and needs a pioneer-and-builder profile who can open up ground under weak foundations, rather than an operator.
The portrait was not perfect, but it was clear, agreed and actionable. It gave later search and assessment a common reference and measure.
Results: with the right direction, the quality of the match improved markedly
Once the Job Portrait was settled, the efficiency and precision of the search improved noticeably.
Building on the new Job Portrait, the YUNLUE team reset the search direction. We stopped chasing the label of technology head from a large tech company and instead targeted three groups: project-type people with manufacturing digital transformation experience; hybrid profiles who had moved from business roles into digitalisation; and practical implementers who had run full digitalisation at a mid-sized company.
Once the Talent Mapping was drawn, we found that the number of candidates who met the criteria was smaller than expected, but the precision was high. We reviewed about 50 candidates in total, interviewed 12 in depth and finally recommended 3 to the company.
The interesting part is that the candidate the company ultimately hired would probably not even have passed the initial screen under the original JD. He did not come from a large technology company, and his technical background was not the strongest. Yet his overall fit was the highest. He had eight years of manufacturing digitalisation experience, had risen from the shop floor to a leadership role and had been through a complete 0-to-1 digital transformation. Rather than a purely technical background, he came from the business side and understood the language of the business thoroughly, communicating with business departments without any barrier. He had led a team of more than ten people and had also run large cross-departmental projects.
More importantly, his capability profile matched the Job Portrait very closely. He had strong business understanding, rich project management experience, outstanding cross-departmental communication and a track record of leading teams. His technical ability, while not top tier, was sufficient for a company at this stage. The company did not need a technology expert; it needed someone who could connect technology and business.
After the candidate joined, the YUNLUE team provided tracking support through the 90-day integration. The first three months are the period when executives most often run into trouble. We helped him quickly understand the company's business and culture, build trust with each department and agree stage objectives and priorities.
In his first month, rather than rushing to install systems, he spent a great deal of time in the workshops, the warehouses and the business departments to understand processes and pain points. In his second month, he produced a three-year digital transformation plan and a first-year implementation roadmap. The plan differed from the boss's original idea, but because it was grounded in real business research, it won management's endorsement quickly.
By the sixth month, the 180-day business success milestone, the first core system had gone live on schedule and business department feedback was better than expected. More importantly, digital transformation was no longer the IT department's project alone; every business department was involved.
In the post-project review, the general manager said: "We used to think the problem was that we couldn't find the right person. We now realise the problem was that we didn't know what kind of person we were looking for. The Job Portrait stage looked like it cost us time, but in fact it helped us avoid a lot of detours."
Six months after the project closed, the company's digital transformation was progressing smoothly and its indicators were being met according to plan. The newly appointed head of digital transformation had also fully integrated into the team and become the general manager's trusted partner on digitalisation.
Lessons: YUNLUE is not a supplier of CVs
Looking back on this project, there are several lessons worth considering for any executive hire.
First, the first step in executive hiring is not to find people but to define the role. Many companies respond to a hiring need by launching a search at once, ideally producing a shortlist within a week. But if the role itself is not clearly defined, the faster you search, the further off course you go. With a wrong direction, more effort means more deviation. Spending enough time to think the role through may look like a delay, but it is in fact the fastest route.
Second, the Job Portrait is not a longer version of the JD. It is a deep understanding of the business and the organisation. Many companies believe that building a Job Portrait just means writing a more detailed JD. Not so. At its core, the Job Portrait answers fundamental questions: why does this role exist, what problem does it solve, and what environment will it work in? Answering them requires a deep understanding of the company's strategy, business, organisation and culture, not simply a list of duties and requirements.
Third, internal consensus on the role matters more than a perfect portrait. Hiring often fails not because the portrait is imprecise, but because people inside the company understand the role differently. The chairman has A in mind, the business head has B, and HR executes C, pulling in three directions at once. How could the right person be found that way? Building the Job Portrait is itself a process of internal alignment and consensus building. Once there is consensus, the direction is right.
Fourth, YUNLUE is not a supplier of CVs but a professional partner in talent decisions. The traditional search model works like this: the company hands over a JD, the search firm goes to the market for CVs and sends over anyone who roughly fits. The problem is that the search firm merely executes instructions and is not accountable for the outcome. YUNLUE's model is different. We do not simply follow the map; we first draw the map correctly with the company, then look for the best fit. We are accountable for the final match, not for the number of CVs we send.
In YUNLUE Consulting's JTIF methodology, the Job Portrait is the starting point and foundation of the entire executive search. It ensures that every later stage, from building the Talent Portrait and drawing the Talent Mapping to assessing candidates, works towards the same clear goal. This is also one of the most fundamental differences between YUNLUE and a traditional search firm.
Executive hiring is a high-risk, high-cost decision. What a company invests is not only search fees and salary costs but precious time and organisational resources. Spending enough time defining the role clearly before launching the search is a matter of responsibility both to the company and to the candidate. With the right direction, every step counts.