Hanold Associates has recruited Evan Swidler, new Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) at IRI. Neela Seenandan and Mayank Parikh headed the search for this Chicago-based position.
Evan Swidler comes to IRI from ATI Physical Therapy where he was the CHRO. As CHRO at IRI, he will act as a close strategic partner to the leadership team to drive a performance-driven and client-centric culture across the organization. He will oversee a team of Human Resources Business Partners, the Talent Acquisition function, Learning & Development and Organizational Development, for an employee population of roughly 2,000. Playing a key role in redesigning and strengthening the US HR function, he will be tasked with upgrading the function’s ability to support the growing and changing needs of an evolving business and industry.
Information Resources Inc (IRI) got its start as a big data company decades before the term existed. Founded in 1979 by John Malec and Gerald Eskin, the organization started out gathering point-of-sale data from bar code scanners and used insight to drive marketing and business decisions.
Today, backed by New Mountain Capital and Vestar Capital Partners and under leadership of CEO Andrew Appel, IRI is a leading technology and services provider in the big data and marketing industry. IRI integrates the world’s largest set of otherwise disconnected purchase, media, social, causal and loyalty data to help CPG, retail, over-the-counter health care and media companies grow their businesses. IRI is enabling the era of personalization by providing the largest, richest dataset, predictive analytics and predictive models to figure out which consumers want which products.
The strategic opportunity for IRI in the next five years is for the company to reinvent itself – as well as the industry – from providing charts and analysis to institutionalizing the use of data and analytics in the minute-to-minute, day-to-day decision making of companies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are twin technologies to enable marketing programs to resonate with customers in more meaningful and lasting ways than ever before. Machines won’t displace the human mind in creativity and execution, but they will push leaders to new places and create a faster, more pliable market where CPGs can respond to the fast-changing pace of consumer desires and demands. AI and ML’s immediate promise and potential are their ability to accomplish very quickly, and with much greater depth and breadth, what would take a human significant time and energy and IRI is positioned to be a key innovator and leader as these technologies change how business is done.
