Search Context
Hood Industries — a multi-generational, family-owned wood products company headquartered in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with roughly 1,400 employees across its manufacturing operations and Hood Distribution — retained RecruitSeed to place a VP of Technology. The role owns all of IT for the enterprise, and it opened at a pivotal moment: Hood was starting up one of the most modern plywood plants in North America, and this executive would make the decisions on the major automation projects going into it.
The Company Behind the Search
On April 17, 2022, a devastating tornado destroyed Hood's plywood facility in Beaumont, Mississippi — the company's original operation, with roots going back roughly forty years. Hood could have taken the loss and consolidated elsewhere. Instead it invested more than $200 million to rebuild in Beaumont: a state-of-the-art plant at twice the prior capacity, 265 jobs, and a workforce shifted toward technical operator roles rather than manual labor. Production started up in late 2025.
A year after the tornado, fire destroyed a third of Hood's sawmill in Bogalusa, Louisiana — nine days after the company had completed a full modernization of the mill. Hood rebuilt that too.
This history was search material, not backstory. A company that twice chose to rebuild — in the same communities, at greater scale — tells a technology executive something no offer letter can about whether leadership follows through on investment. We put that record, and the culture behind it (the "Hood Way": people, process, performance — in that order), in front of every serious candidate.
The Judgment Call
The VP of Technology owns all of IT and makes the calls on the major automation projects going into the new plywood facility — evaluating vendors, sequencing capital, integrating data from the facilities down to the PLC level. That is non-trivial work for one executive, and it shaped how we read the spec. What the role did not require was a history of hands-on operational technology implementation. What it did require was fluency in industrial operations — a career in building materials, wood products, or industrial businesses broadly: companies with physical locations, trucks, and a supply chain — plus a computer science degree and experience leading software developers. We separated "must have done it" from "must be able to lead and decide on it," and screened for the second.
The pool math made that reading matter. A computer science degree plus experience leading developers eliminates most manufacturing IT leaders in the South, and those who remain tend toward very long tenures — not a show-stopper, but a net reduction, since long-tenured leaders rarely relocate. This is why the search demanded breadth, not a bigger version of the usual sourcing.
Hiring Criteria
The profile required all of these together.
Sourcing Patterns
- Adjacent process-manufacturing verticals — building materials, metals, paper — produced the strongest pool: transferable transformation experience with learnable industry specifics
- Candidates from forestry and lumber backgrounds knew the industry but rarely had the enterprise technology depth the role required
- Technology leaders from discrete manufacturing (automotive, electronics) struggled to translate to process manufacturing environments
Decision Criteria
- Strong candidates probed the transformation roadmap's realism, leadership's commitment to technology investment, and the role's decision-making authority
- Culture fit and strategic alignment outweighed compensation at the top of the pool
The Relocation Conversation
The role sits at headquarters in Hattiesburg, and for most viable candidates that meant relocation — a serious life decision involving a family, a house, and in one case a child in the final year of high school. Our job was to be informative and accurate enough that a genuinely busy executive would make a serious self-inquiry — have the family discussion, sketch a contingent plan — before agreeing to interview, not after an offer.
Along the way, solid candidates proposed negotiating a hybrid schedule built around headquarters visits. The case was compelling enough that it could have been sold to the client. We kept searching instead: the reasons for being at headquarters were many, given the nature of the business and the modernization underway.
The Placement
The placed executive matched the spec as written: a computer science degree, development teams led, and significant, proven IT transformation at a larger company in the building materials industry. Then they exceeded it. The search deliberately didn't demand a hands-on operational technology history — and the placement brought one anyway, with strong shop-floor automation accomplishments in flooring manufacturing.
Over several hours of conversation, what stood out most was how they engaged the human side of an organization — including a firsthand account of breaking through with a key individual on a problem that, in many environments, would have stayed permanent.
The fit ran both directions. Hood's story — the tornado, the fire, two rebuilds, a family business that invests in its people and its communities — was part of how we presented the opportunity, and part of why the candidate said yes. Fifty-six days from kickoff to accepted offer.