Vice President of Enterprise Applications: Direct Hire for Acquisition Integration for a Rapidly Growing Firm

The Client

Global Engineering and Consulting firm

Our client is an engineering and general contracting firm supporting thousands of ongoing and complex projects around the globe. They are an industry leader with a team that is passionate about their work and their clients’ success. With global offices located in most major cities, they continue to grow and expand at a rapid pace. They have recently partnered with the recruiting and placement experts at The Squires Group to provide talent solutions guidance to support their growing accounting and finance teams.

The Support

  • Deltek/CostPoint Expertise
  • Management of Enterprise Applications
  • Functional Knowledge and Requirements Definition
  • Technical Roll-Out and Transition Planning
  • Mergers and Acquisitions

The Challenge

For the past several years, our client has experienced hyper growth—which has been fueled by a combination of organic growth and mergers and acquisitions. During this expansion, our client also implemented Deltek’s CostPoint as their accounting system of record. As a result, their IT organization needed to take on the challenging task of integrating all their acquisitions into their new CostPoint system.

To support this critical integration, our client was in need of highly skilled direct hire that would help them with internal restructuring, optimizing both their accounting and IT systems and lead the enterprise team through a critical Costpoint integration.

To find the right talent, two different search options were discussed:

  • Option 1: Create a new role for a Vice President of Enterprise Applications. Identify a candidate with strong business acumen who would operate as the trusted leader of the organization. This individual would have both CostPoint and M&A experience while being responsible for: assessing the enterprise challenges, defining the strategic plan, and establishing an execution plan for the company and the IT organization.
  • Option 2: Hire two senior resources –A Senior Functional candidate that would work with the business users to define the functional specs to integrate various acquired companies into CostPoint. The second individual would be a Senior Technical resource that would take the functional specs and build them into our client’s unique CostPoint system.

The Solution

Using our proprietary In The Perfect Space (ITPS)SM methodology, our dedicated Account Manager was able to help define both search options. To start, our client directed us to focus on Option 2—which included identifying both functional and technical resources.

Upon interviewing the senior technical and functional candidates from our search efforts, our client began to understand the need for a more strategic hire – one that would help shape and guide their overall IT vision and strategy. With that realization, we re-directed our search to identify a candidate that could step into their newly created role of Vice President of Enterprise Applications.

After a thorough search, we identified a Director of Financial Systems that had huge potential and was ready to take the next step in their career. Our candidate initially started his career as a CostPoint developer and had been promoted multiple times within their organization.

This unique career path allowed our candidate to gain a well-rounded skill set and more importantly, a deep understanding of both the technical and functional aspects of IT and accounting systems. In addition, their experience with a large government contracting firm included the integration of CostPoint into newly merged entities!

As our client moved through the interview process, they continued to be impressed with our candidate’s vision, professional experience, and their cultural fit factors. Ultimately, they made an offer to our highly skilled candidate to join their company as their new Vice President of Enterprise Applications. Our candidate accepted and joined our client’s firm after successfully transitioning his responsibilities at his previous company.

The Success

Our candidate hit the ground running, and the CFO is very impressed with the impact that our candidate has delivered in this newly created role. In addition to managing the in-house IT employees, our candidate has also established strong relationships with external vendors that are helping with technical aspects of the CostPoint system.

Many challenges are on the road ahead of them, but the first few projects have started off on the right track and continue to progress toward completion. Our client and our candidate believe that this newly created role will help them function more smoothly now and well into the future as they continue on their path of global expansion.

The Testimonial

Candidate Testimonial:
“I had a very positive experience working The Squires Group expert staffing and placement team from start to finish. Ed Kennedy, who was my Resource Manager, was extremely helpful and thorough during the entire process. He was quick in getting the answer to any of my questions.

I am very excited about this opportunity, and I believe that this is an excellent career progression for me and I can already tell that this could be a long-term home for me.

Based on my experience working with The Squires Group, I would be happy to refer anyone I know that is looking for a new position.”

Client Testimonial:
“I have been involved in human capital and partnered with many recruiters over the years. The staffing experts at The Squires Group are at the top of my list.

Thank you to The Squires Group for being a trusted advisor.”


Do you have a need for direct hire staffing services? Reach out to The Squires Group, a top accounting and financial services recruiting firm that provides custom talent acquisition solutions designed to help your organization achieve its goals.


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