Client story · Healthcare
Head of Customer Experience Search: When the Market Is Saturated
- Industry
- Healthcare
- Job function
- Customer Experience
- Level
- Head of Department
- Location
- Jakarta
About the Company
Our client is one of Indonesia's leading hospital groups. The group needed a Head of Customer Experience (CX), a role that proved to be a very different kind of executive search assignment.
What Challenges They Faced
The position had been open for almost a year. During that period, the client had reviewed dozens of candidates from its own sourcing and from the broader recruitment market, but none had met the expectations of the organization.
The challenge was no longer simply finding candidates: the market itself had become saturated. Most candidates with a direct Customer Experience background had already been approached, evaluated, or were simply not the right fit.
At this stage, continuing to search for candidates with exactly the same background would likely produce the same result.
How Talent Hunts Helped
Expanding the definition of the ideal candidate
Instead of limiting the search to people who had held a formal Head of Customer Experience title, our consultant looked for executives with something equally important: a strong understanding of Customer Experience, combined with the vision, exposure, leadership capability and transferable experience to build and lead the function.
What mattered was whether they understood the customer journey, service experience, customer expectations, operational touchpoints, and the strategic importance of CX to the business.
Looking beyond the traditional CX candidate pool
This opened a different segment of the executive market. We identified candidates who had:
- Strong exposure to Customer Experience initiatives
- A clear understanding of customer journey and service quality
- Experience working across multiple business functions
- Strategic and commercial thinking
- The ability to influence stakeholders across an organization
- Leadership potential to develop and transform the CX function
The objective was not to find someone with "CX" written on their CV, but an executive who could think like a CX leader and create meaningful customer experience transformation.
The candidate the client had been waiting for
After an extensive search and assessment process, we presented a candidate who did not fit the traditional definition of a pure CX professional, but who demonstrated the vision, exposure, leadership capability and strategic understanding the organization was looking for.
The client saw the potential. After almost a year of searching, the organization decided to hire our candidate.
When the market is saturated, searching harder is not always the answer. Sometimes, you need to search differently.
For difficult senior positions, the value of an executive search partner is the ability to rethink the search strategy when the conventional approach stops producing results. The right candidate is not always the most obvious candidate.
Your Next Great Hire Starts Here
Hiring a CFO, CEO, Country Manager or another senior leader in Indonesia? Tell us about the role, and a consultant will outline how we would run the search.
Talent Hunts Indonesia — Executive Search Beyond the CV.
