Project Summary

Our Client: Sargento Foods

Having partnered with the Sargento Foods family in the past, we were excited for the opportunity to work with them once again – this time in the search for a new Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO). Meeting with the executive team at their HQ in Plymouth, WI for our kick-off we created a hit list of “wants and needs” relative to the position of CHRO and got to work:

  • Current CHRO would be retiring in a years’ time
  • Needed a candidate imminently so as to allow for adequate training period should current CHRO retire early
  • Focus on candidates from Fortune 500 organizations that have won “Top Workplace” and similar industry awards
  • Candidate located in Sheboygan or willing to relocate
  • Candidate with at least a Master’s Degree
  • Candidate willing to carry on and imbue their role with Sargento Foods’ standard of excellence

The Search for a New Chief Human Resources Officer

As with all executive-level searches, we began by conducting interviews with other current Sargento Food executives. Interviewing current leadership is a strength of Quovis and gives us an edge in matching leaders to culture. Through the interview process, we learned that Sargento’s main priority was finding a CHRO committed to maintaining their stellar workplace culture and upholding their company values of community, family, work/life balance and giving back.  It became obvious that we needed a candidate with larger company experience, but also someone who could honor the Sargento culture.

We conducted our executive search using all the tools at our disposal including social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Xing. We also did extensive research on all large, top workplace award winners in major US Markets.

Finding a candidate for a C-level position takes 12 months, but we found an ideal candidate and made him an offer within 100 days.

Our Results

Working with Sargento Foods and its executives was truly a pleasure.  While most candidates we contacted had indeed heard of the Sargento brand, they did not have a clear understanding of how truly exceptional this company is. We enjoyed evangelizing their story across the United States in our targeting of executives from other top workplaces.  On the candidate-side, it was very important for us to understand the candidate’s story and their motivation, as well as how they would fit into Sargento’s tight-knit, family-oriented culture. In the end, we relocated a candidate from Atlanta who had experience working with a large, reputable organization boasting high workplace ratings.

Needless to say, Sargento Foods was once again incredibly impressed with our results and efficiency. We later found out that they had tried to do a candidate search in-house before turning to us to help. We have earned repeated business with Sargento in candidate searches and have received glowing reviews about our process and our service.