With businesses operating in a more challenging growth environment in 2024 and the pace of tech change accelerating, where will the C Suite be looking to hire in the new year? We chat to Lewis Bantin about the five key roles he expects to see more hiring requirements for in the new year:
Chief Revenue Officer
As we enter 2024 I would expect the increasingly popular role of Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) to see even more demand as companies look to hit growth goals in a more challenging market. The role of the CRO is broad, spanning sales, marketing and business development, but is designed to unify departments across the business to focus on growth across the customer lifecycle. Whereas you may be able to get away with gaps in your sales process or team understanding of the value proposition in high-growth times, there is now quite rightly more scrutiny than ever on ensuring there are absolutely no leaks in your pipeline and fast feedback on what’s working, which is why the role is so important. Key to NRR growth will be customer success, and we are increasingly seeing demand from the CRO role for tools and services that can help improve customer experience (CX) and drive further growth (Commify and Moneypenny are just two examples within our portfolio!)
Revenue Operations
Directly linked to the hire of the CRO role is the general growth of RevOps and SalesOps. As highlighted at our Sales and Marketing offsite earlier this year, RevOps is the fastest growing job in the US according to LinkedIn, as companies look to unify and align the operations, systems and data that supports revenue teams. With sales enablement a key function for any business, but the tools and infrastructure used by sales teams becoming increasingly complex, I would expect to see the analytics engine that sits behind the sales pipeline grow, particularly for businesses who want high quality forecasting. As the Pirelli tagline goes, power is nothing without control!
Chief of Staff
Just like in the White House, the Chief of Staff’s role in a business is to enable leaders – in this case CEOs – to execute their mission. They should be able to convey complex ideas in simple terms and to build relationships across the organisation. With employee expectations around purpose, transparency and accountability increasing, at the same time as leaders operate in an increasingly complex and demanding business environment, additional arms and legs to help leadership execute and communicate effectively will be key.
Chief Information Security Officer
The pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza war means that the 2020s has been highly volatile so far, with an increased cyber security threat now a structural challenge for most businesses. It is no surprise then that companies are looking for robust measures to bridge the gap between overall business strategy and cyber security risk management (it’s one of the reasons our portfolio company, ISMS.online has seen so much demand for ISO 27001 and SOC2). It’s why I expect there to be a significant further growth in CISO hires in 2024, and with claims that on average it takes six months to recruit a CISO… you might want to start now!
Data & Solutions Architects
Demand for AI talent is at an all-time high, and there is no one role that will “own” AI within a business; should this sit within the CTO’s remit or under the Head of Data? However, we would expect to see growing demand within the tech team for data architects to build data infrastructure, and solutions architects to build the AI solutions. (Not forgetting the data engineers to feed the systems and data governance analysts to ensure data quality and compliance!) This won’t be relevant for every company – many will be able to use off the shelf solutions which will grow in accessibility and plug-in-and-play capabilities in 2024 – but for any companies that are looking to develop something more bespoke, companies should consider what data skills they will need to ensure their systems keep evolving and scaling.
