MATTHEW AYERS TALKS ABOUT "LEAN JOBS: HIGH DEMAND FOR HIGH-LEVEL PEOPLE"
12/16/2009 —
The Lean Insider (http://leaninsider.productivitypress.com/) posted an interview yesterday with Matthew Ayer, Stiles Associates' Vice President of Executive Search.
Excerpt from Lean Jobs: High Demand for High Level People
The job market is strong for senior executives who can lead lean enterprise-wide transformations. And overall, lean employment in the year ahead is likely to be better than this past year.
Those are the beliefs of Matthew Ayers, vice president of executive search for Stiles Associates, a recruiting firm specializing in filling lean jobs.
“We’ve weathered the storm of 2009,” he says. “We’re very optimistic 2010 will be much stronger.”
Ayers says his firm saw companies putting searches on hold beginning around March and April of this year. But after what he describes as a slow summer, “the past month or two, it’s really lit up. Whether it’s folks looking for releasing funds in their budgets, or to capitalize on Q1, the lean world is on fire right now.”
Stiles Associates specializes in higher-level lean positions, “from the plant manager and lean deployment leaders to the CEO,” Ayers says. (And occasionally “we do have clients who ask us to build their entire lean team,” he notes.) The biggest demand, he says, is for people with the highest levels of experience.
“The folks that really know how to come in, and know policy deployment, can cascade lean across the business, the folks that have the ability to lead and orchestrate those rollouts are in big demand,” he comments.
Read the entire article online at http://leaninsider.productivitypress.com/. The article was posted on 12/15/2009.