First Hire & Market Entry
Akens\Nordburg supports international companies developing activity in a new market and needing to decide which capability to hire first, whether the profile is realistic and how to find the right person.
The first important hire can shape how the organisation develops afterwards, so it is worth defining the need before starting to search for candidates.
The first critical hire is not always the first employee
A company may already be doing business in Spain before it has a complete local structure. There may be customers, distributors, commercial activity managed from headquarters or technical support provided from another country.
For that reason, the first critical hire is not always the first person formally employed in the market. This situation is also common when a company that has until now covered Spain from headquarters, through exports or via distributors decides to build its own capability in the market. The key question is what capability the company needs to establish in order to move into its next stage.
In some cases that will be commercial development. In others, local leadership, a technical function or the foundation of a future team.
Start with the business need, not the job title
A Country Manager may be the right first hire when there is a local organisation to build and lead, sufficient responsibility for the market and a clear expectation of further development. Creating the role simply because the company is entering Spain can, however, produce a position that is too senior for responsibilities that do not yet exist.
The same applies to Business Development. If the priority is to create a market from the ground up, a strong Business Development profile may be exactly what is needed. If there is already a customer base, distributor network or significant Technical Sales activity, the requirement may be very different.
Before deciding the title, we need to understand what the person should have achieved after the first twelve or eighteen months, what autonomy they will have, what support they will receive from headquarters and what organisation should exist afterwards if the project develops successfully.
Define → Validate → Recruit
Define
The first step is to translate the business objective into a concrete responsibility: open a market, develop customers, lead a subsidiary, create a technical capability, take on local operations or prepare the development of a team.
Validate
Once the need is clear, we test whether the combination of seniority, experience, languages, location, compensation and sector context is realistic in the market. A specification can look reasonable on paper and still become extremely restrictive when every requirement needs to be found in the same person.
Recruit
When the mandate is sufficiently defined and validated, the search moves into Market Mapping, Direct Search and assessment of the professionals who can best respond to the real need behind the project.
Two projects with different starting points
Sales & Business Development Manager — Spain
Search for a German industrial technology company looking to develop its activity in Spain.
The first critical capability was commercial: open business, develop customers, understand a technical product and operate with a high level of autonomy. The profile also needed to be able to contribute later to the development of the local organisation.
Country Manager — Spain
Search for an international banking and technology group building its Spanish operation from the ground up.
In this case, the requirement called for a higher level of responsibility: implement the local model, develop the organisation and later hire the team, while coordinating closely with group companies in Switzerland and Germany.
Both companies were developing a presence in Spain, but they needed very different first hires.
Think about what comes next
The first hire should not be defined in isolation when there is already some visibility on the next stage of development.
A commercial profile may become the starting point for a future sales structure; a Country Manager may need to build a team; a first technology hire may establish a capability that is later expanded with additional specialists. Understanding that sequence helps avoid both over-sizing the first role and hiring someone whose responsibilities quickly become misaligned with the evolution of the project.
The objective is not to design the entire organisation in advance, but to check that the first decision also makes sense for the next stage.
Depending on the role, the resulting search may sit within our Executive Search or specialist Recruitment work.
Talent decision and employment setup are different questions
Defining and finding the first person and deciding how that person will be employed legally and operationally are related but different questions.
When a project also requires support on employment structure, EoR, payroll or legal matters, those needs should be handled with the appropriate specialists without turning the talent decision into a general market-entry consulting exercise.
Are you defining your first hire?
If you are entering a new market, moving from an indirect presence to your own structure or need to decide which capability to hire first, we can review the need, test it against the market and then manage the search.