Another Avigilon Exec Out, Impact On Expansion?

Last month, Avigilon touted their Vice President of People. Now, she is gone and Avigilon is running an ad to find a replacement.

HR is especially important to Avigilon as the company aims for a 'rough doubling' of employees in 2014, adding hundreds of new people.

It could be that the ousted VP of People just did a bad job and needed to be replaced after about a half year on the job. Even if that is the case, it will take time to hire and on-board the replacement.

This follows the VP of Sales taking over all of operations and efforts to find a new VP of marketing.

I see this as a not-necessarily-bad thing. I've definitely met HR people I think should be fired (yes I'm talking about physical security vendors). Modern corporations have overly chirpy social network/PR machines so almost any signal visible to is suspect as just noise, no matter the vendor or clue level. Disclaimer: I don't know the context so I'm not claiming to offer a truly informed opinion.

Even if the person was bad, and the replacement is better, the problem is meeting short term growth numbers. At the growth rate that Avigilon aims for and the market expects (50%+ on a $180 M base), replacing multiple executives makes things a lot more challenging.

Normally, HR is not a very critical executive function, but it is important when you are a company with ~500 people aiming to add another ~300 this year.

That may be true but you're much better off replacing someone half a year into the job than wait a couple of years and wish you did it sooner.

Another senior Avigilon HR person has left. She billed herself as "Team Avigilon's #1 fan"....

While soft skills like HR are hard to measure, I generally would any HR candidate with a résumé that includes words like "Youth Advocate", "Social Responsibility". I would also question naming the positoin "VP of 'People'". How can you even say that without giggling?

Well, Google has a whole division called "People Operations", aka Human Resources. And they are 'champions' of Google's culture.

HR, err, People, err, People Operations is different...