Industrial and manufacturing executive search

Retained search across industrial and manufacturing, from plant construction and process delivery through site operations, engineering and reliability. Vice president to C‑suite.

Key roles we place ↓

Overview

What we do in industrial and manufacturing

Metric Geo places senior and executive leaders across industrial and manufacturing, covering industrial construction and process plant delivery, manufacturing site operations, and the engineering and maintenance leadership behind them. Searches are retained and run from vice president through C-suite.

Two different kinds of client hire here and they want different people. A contractor building a plant needs delivery leadership that understands process and schedule risk. A manufacturer running that plant afterwards needs someone who can hold output, safety and cost for years. We keep the two apart, because candidates rarely cross over well.

Roles

The roles we place in industrial and manufacturing

VP Operations Multi-site manufacturing or industrial delivery leadership.
Plant Manager Full site accountability for output, safety and cost.
Project Director Large industrial and process plant construction delivery.
Director of Engineering Process, automation and capital project engineering.
VP Manufacturing Network level manufacturing leadership across sites.
Head of Continuous Improvement Operational excellence, lean and productivity programs.
Director of Maintenance & Reliability Asset reliability, uptime and maintenance strategy.
Chief Operating Officer Operational leadership across plants and business units.
VP Sales Industrial equipment, automation and aftermarket sales leadership.

+ many others

Within this sector

What industrial and manufacturing covers

Industrial Construction

Plant, process and heavy industrial building delivery.

Manufacturing Operations

Site and network operations leadership.

Process & Automation

Process engineering, controls and automation leadership.

Reliability & Continuous Improvement

Uptime, maintenance strategy and operational excellence.

Market

Hiring in industrial and manufacturing right now

Reshoring has put a great deal of industrial construction into the market at once, and battery, semiconductor and food manufacturing plants are all competing for the same delivery leadership. A project director who has built a complex process plant can more or less choose where they work.

On the operations side the problem is different. Plants are being commissioned faster than experienced plant managers are being developed, so a lot of companies are promoting people a level early and hoping. Some of that works. Where it does not, it shows up in safety and output inside the first year.

Automation and controls leadership sits underneath both of these and gets overlooked. As plants become more instrumented, the person who owns that layer increasingly decides whether a site hits its numbers. It is worth hiring that role before the plant is running rather than after.

Common questions

Industrial hiring questions

The questions clients ask most often before briefing an industrial or manufacturing search.

How long does an industrial or manufacturing search take?

We work to seven days to a shortlist on most briefs. How long the search takes after that depends on the role and on notice periods, so we set out a realistic timeline with you at the start.

Do you work retained or contingent?

Retained. Our industrial and manufacturing consultants have spent years building relationships in this market, so most shortlists start from people we already know, and talent mapping, backed by our marketing reach, covers the rest of the market so nobody credible gets missed. Retained is what lets us give that kind of time to one brief.

Do you place below vice president?

Our focus is vice president and above, but we do take on director and senior manager searches where the role is critical, such as a plant manager on a difficult site, or a reliability lead through a commissioning. What matters is whether it is a hire you cannot afford to get wrong.

Do you hire for building the plant or for running it?

Both, and we treat them as separate markets. Construction delivery leadership and manufacturing operations leadership look similar on paper and behave very differently in practice, and people who are genuinely good at one are often not suited to the other. If you need both, we would run two searches.