Hiring their first Global Head of DEI

The challenge

Heineken was looking to hire their first Global Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). We had successfully completed multiple previous placements with them, so they approached us to help them with this challenge.

The challenge was that Heineken is a very large decentralised business, but they wanted to build a central DEI strategy across the entire business. They were looking for someone who could run DEI at this scale, with minimal resources, no existing team in place and with a background enabling them to understand Heineken as a business.

A lot of Heineken employees work there in the second generation and Heineken as a business needed to change since they realised “just” brewing beer would not be enough anymore in the future.

The solution

Not only did we fill the role, we also helped them with the job description and advised them on the person’s reporting line as well as the overall hiring approach.

We activated our network and ran a global skill-based search, without excluding candidates because of location or industry background. This resulted in a shortlist of four candidates who, apart from one, were all international candidates.

The outcome

Heineken interviewed all candidates. One of them, a female engineer who used to work in sales and later in her career had moved into DEI, clearly stood out.

Despite having worked in a different industry before, thanks to her engineering skills and experience in sales she was able to understand Heineken as a business and its people at their core. Heineken hired her.

The new hire had to relocate from Paris to Amsterdam, so we supported her with understanding what that would mean for her in legal terms and helped her adjust to the situation.

Ever since, she has done extremely successful work achieving an ambassador scheme across the business. And leveraging these ambassadors within Heineken to build on that awareness that is much wider than just internally but also includes their external communication with their consumers. Heineken’s DEI strategy has since often been mentioned in an exemplary manner and she’s been giving keynotes on the topic as well.