Global HR Service Continuity Recovery Leader — Consumer Products

The mandate

A forty-hour people-platform outage coincided with an outsourcing partner’s early exit, leaving hires unable to start, managers unable to confirm approvals and sensitive employee cases moving through uncontrolled email. Country teams improvised different workarounds, service inventories omitted upstream identity and downstream document dependencies, and restoration priorities followed ticket volume rather than employee consequence. The global services vice president resigned during the post-incident review.

The interim begins within seven days for twelve months, covering immediate stabilisation, provider transition, three peak workforce cycles, five full-chain simulations and recruitment of a permanent leader. A platform release, vendor failure, cyber restriction, volume surge, country rule change, centre outage or identity interruption becomes a governed continuity event. Eight final weeks are reserved for successor shadowing and an independent command exercise.

Handover requires consequence-tiered services, complete dependency maps, minimum operating procedures, secure offline routes, recovery objectives, multilingual communications, backlog reconciliation, vendor obligations, evidence retention and trained incident roles across thirty-two countries. The successor must command a surprise regional outage during a mass-onboarding week and restore priority services without unapproved channels, lost approvals or consultant-held knowledge.

The leader may declare a people-service incident, activate approved workarounds, freeze nonessential changes, redirect Kč1.4 billion of authorised recovery expenditure, reprioritise vendor capacity, close unsafe local channels and replace temporary recovery leads. Country HR retains statutory and employee decisions; Security commands cyber incidents; technology owners restore platforms. Provider termination, permanent appointments and residual-risk acceptance sit with the executive committee.

Payroll calculation, benefit-plan redesign, labour negotiation, cyber forensics, individual grievance decisions, enterprise disaster recovery and wholesale HR-platform replacement are out of scope. The interim can protect service continuity and case confidentiality but may not reinterpret local law, settle employee matters, conceal control breaks or preserve a workaround after the accountable process owner rejects its risk.

Why this seat is open

The global services leader resigned after a prolonged outage and supplier exit revealed that documented recovery plans did not follow real employee journeys. Immediate executive control is needed before the next high-volume onboarding cycle, while a permanent search runs for a leader who can sustain evidence-led resilience across countries and partners.

What you will own

• Rank hire, move, leave, absence, document, access and employee-case services by consequence and recovery tolerance.
• Map technology, identity, vendor, knowledge, approval, language, document and country dependencies for each priority journey.
• Design secure minimum-operation routes with activation authority, capacity thresholds, reconciliation and mandatory retirement conditions.
• Establish incident roles, cross-country communications, employee protection, backlog triage and evidence-preservation protocols.
• Govern provider exit and replacement readiness without embedding untested manual workarounds as the target operation.
• Command five simulations covering platform outage, centre loss, vendor failure, identity interruption and volume surge.
• Transfer incident command after the successor restores an unseen regional disruption during peak onboarding volume.

Candidate qualifications

• Held executive responsibility for multinational HR services, employee operations or shared-service continuity at significant scale.
• Recovered employee lifecycle journeys after platform outage, provider failure or uncontrolled local workaround proliferation.
• Built service tiers, dependency maps, secure minimum operations, recovery objectives and post-restoration reconciliation evidence.
• Directed vendors, centres, technology owners and country teams without taking their statutory or specialist decisions.
• Protected sensitive employee cases and approvals while operating under degraded identity and communication conditions.
• Handed incident command to permanent leadership through surprise simulations and a peak-cycle continuity event.

Non-negotiables

• Available within seven days for Prague leadership, nine centre residencies and five full-chain continuity simulations.
• Direct multinational HR service recovery is required; steady-state shared-services optimisation alone is insufficient.
• Will disclose outsourcing partners, HR platforms, continuity advisers, consumer-products employers and technology providers.
• Will not calculate payroll, redesign benefits, negotiate labour terms, investigate cyber events or settle employee cases.

1. 49 words maximum. Describe an HR outage where the documented recovery order ignored employee consequence.
2. 49 words maximum. How did you retire emergency workarounds without losing approvals or sensitive case evidence?
3. 49 words maximum. Give your earliest Prague start date and your role in a surprise continuity exercise.