General management
Country Manager
The hardest and most consequential hire a foreign group makes in Vietnam. The constraint is rarely capability; it is finding someone who has carried a P&L here and is willing to leave a position they already own.
General Manager
Often a site, business unit or joint-venture lead. The real question is how much autonomy the role carries, and strong candidates ask it in the first conversation.
Managing Director
Usually involves board exposure and a reporting line into a regional or global centre. Matrix literacy matters as much as local market knowledge.
Chief Executive Officer
For domestic groups and funded companies, typically the move from founder-led to professionally managed. Chemistry with the chairman decides these searches more often than the brief does.
Finance
Chief Financial Officer
The scarce combination is group reporting depth alongside genuine fluency in Vietnamese statutory accounting and tax. Candidates strong in one and weak in the other are plentiful.
Finance Director
Often the first senior finance hire in a growing entity, carrying controllership, treasury and compliance at once.
Head of Finance
Business-unit level, usually reporting into a group CFO with a dotted line to the local general manager.
Commercial
Chief Commercial Officer
Where sales, marketing and pricing sit under one person. Candidates who have genuinely owned all three are rarer than titles suggest.
Sales Director
Channel experience is the discriminator. General trade, modern trade, B2B and field-force leadership are different disciplines and do not transfer as easily as CVs imply.
Marketing Director
Brand-building and performance-marketing backgrounds have diverged. Deciding which one the business actually needs is part of the calibration.
Operations, manufacturing and supply chain
Plant Manager and Factory Manager
Pool depth depends heavily on process type and site location. Industrial-park geography is a live constraint, not a detail.
Operations Director
Multi-site or multi-function ownership, frequently paired with a cost or productivity mandate.
Supply Chain Director
Demand planning, procurement and distribution leadership. Cold-chain and regulated-goods experience narrows the field sharply.
Quality and Compliance leadership
Usually customer-audit driven. Credibility with the auditing client matters as much as internal capability.
Human resources
HR Director and CHRO
Two very different mandates sit under similar titles: building a people function from scratch, or professionalising one that already exists. We separate them at the brief stage.
Head of Talent Acquisition
Usually hired when internal hiring volume outgrows an outsourced model.
Compensation and Benefits lead
Scarce at the senior end, particularly where the role spans manufacturing and office populations.
Technology and digital
Chief Technology Officer
For funded companies and digital-first businesses. We are candid about the limits of our reach in deep engineering niches.
IT Director
Enterprise systems, infrastructure and security leadership inside non-technology businesses.
Product Director
Concentrated in a small number of companies in Vietnam, which makes the mapping exercise short and the persuasion exercise long.
If your role is not listed. The list above reflects where we work most often, not a boundary. What matters more than the title is whether the role is senior enough that the right person has to be approached rather than attracted. Ask us and we will tell you plainly whether we are the right firm for it, including when we are not.
Replacing someone who is still in the seat
A meaningful share of these searches are confidential successions. The incumbent is in post, the team does not know, and a leak is expensive. We run those mandates without naming the client until there is mutual interest and an agreed disclosure point, and we keep the candidate list tight rather than broad for exactly that reason.