From a Chief People Officer Brief to an Operating Partner: Placing a Leader Whose Scope Outgrew the Job Title

The Challenge

In 2023, this European vacation rental software company closed a $175 million growth round from a growth equity investor, one of the largest investments its market segment had seen. At the time, the company had grown to more than 160 employees spread across 40+ countries, operating remotely from day one.

Funding on that scale changes what a company needs from its leadership. The founding team had been running people operations themselves as an extension of building the product and the business. That works at a smaller scale. It gets harder to sustain once a company is trying to professionalise its people function across dozens of countries with no central office.

The company needed someone to build a real people function for its next stage of growth, ideally someone who understood how to operate inside a fully remote, globally distributed team, not just manage HR policy from a headquarters.

They turned to The Big Search.

Overview of the Executive Search

PE-backed vacation rental software platform, Finland | One executive hire | August 2023 → October 2023 | PE Value Creation: Operational Infrastructure Phase

Three months after closing its growth round, the company retained The Big Search to find a Chief People Officer. We closed the search in just under three months. The hire was made, but the scope of the role expanded in the process: the person placed took on a Chief Operating Officer remit rather than a narrower people-only mandate.

Executive Search Across Remote-First, High-Growth SaaS Operations Leadership

We targeted operators who had built out people or business operations infrastructure inside a bootstrapped or VC-backed SaaS company during a period of significant revenue growth in a fully remote setting. This is not the traditional CPO talent pool, and that was deliberate.

Criteria we screened against:

• A track record building people or operations infrastructure through a period of significant revenue growth
• Direct experience operating inside a 100% remote team spread across dozens of countries
• Comfort owning a broad operational remit rather than a narrow HR or benefits function
• Exposure to company-scale change (growth, restructuring, or exit events)
• No relocation requirement; genuine fit with a fully distributed working model
• Cultural fit for a fast-moving, founder-led environment

We identified 73 candidates in total.

Days to first shortlist delivery: 19 days from kick-off

⏱ Days to first shortlist delivery: 19 days from kick-off

Of those, 29 were approached directly. 28 responded and 26 expressed genuine interest, a 97% response rate and 90% interest rate against an otherwise hard-to-reach pool. 28 candidates advanced to a recruiter interview, 15 made the shortlist, and 9 met the client directly before an offer was made.

The funnel shape tells its own story: strong response and interest at the top, but a wide gap between people who engaged and the small group who actually matched what the client was looking for. This was never an outreach problem. It was a scarcity problem: operators who have genuinely built people, finance, or operations infrastructure from near-zero inside a fully remote company are rare, and the client held a high bar for who reached the final stage.

The Placed Candidate: An Operator Who Had Already Scaled a Remote Team From the Ground Up

They joined the process with roughly 8 years at one company, starting as VP of Operations and rising to Chief Operating Officer at a fully remote, bootstrapped SaaS company. Over that period, the company grew headcount from around 14 to more than 400 people across 45+ countries, with the business growing revenue roughly 20x during their tenure. The company was later acquired by a larger enterprise analytics company. Before that role, they spent over a decade in product and IT roles in the insurance sector.

They had never held a title with "people" in it before this search. At their previous company, people operations sat inside their broader COO remit for most of their tenure rather than as a standalone function. That background ended up mapping directly onto what the client needed: the role that was created went beyond a traditional Chief People Officer mandate into a broader operating remit.

Why they fit:

🌍 Remote-native at scale: Helped grow a fully remote team from roughly 14 to 400+ people across 45+ countries, the exact operating model the client was scaling into.

📈 Proven growth conditions: Operated through a period of roughly 20x revenue growth at their previous company, giving them lived experience of a comparable growth curve.

💼 Operations-first background: Came from a COO seat where people operations was one part of a wider mandate, not a standalone HR function, a close match for how the role evolved during the search.

🤝 Exit experience: Was inside the business through its acquisition by a larger analytics company, relevant given the client's own growth and M&A trajectory following its raise.

🧭 Cultural match: Years operating in a fully remote, globally distributed team gave them instant credibility with a founder-led, distributed organisation.

A Chief People Officer brief doesn't always stay a Chief People Officer job once the right person is in the room. We closed this search in about 3 months, from kickoff to placement, and delivered a leader whose remit expanded to cover operations more broadly, at a company that had just closed a nine-figure growth round.

The strongest people leaders for fast-scaling remote companies don't always come from a traditional HR career path. Sometimes they come from operators who happened to own the people function as one part of a larger operational mandate, and who can prove it with real numbers from a company that already made that climb.

If your next people hire needs to be an operator first and an HR specialist second, let's talk.