Artisanal Talent Assists Workday with President, Product and Technology Search
March 4, 2025 – Executive search firm Artisanal Talent has assisted in the recruitment of Gerrit Kazmaier as president, product and technology of Workday Inc. in Pleasanton, CA. He will succeed Sayan Chakraborty, who is retiring from Workday, assuming leadership of the company’s innovation strategy and product and technology organization. “Gerrit’s strong enterprise software experience and a proven track record in cloud and AI transformation, make him the perfect person to lead the next chapter of Workday’s innovation,” said Carl Eschenbach, CEO of Workday. “We are grateful to Sayan for being a driving force for our innovation strategy for the past 10 years, and we look forward to building on his great work under Gerrit’s leadership.”
“Huge congrats to Carl Eschenbach and the Workday team for landing a superstar in Gerrit Kazmaier,” Chris Johnson, founder and CEO of Artisanal Talent, said in a LinkedIn post. “As the CEO of a $70B+ public company, Carl put on a clinic when it comes to recruiting.”
Mr. Kazmaier brings extensive experience driving innovation in enterprise software. He joins Workday from Google Cloud, where he led the data analytics and business intelligence division, overseeing the organization’s AI-ready data cloud strategy. Before Google, Mr. Kazmaier spent nearly 11 years at SAP in various leadership roles, including president of SAP HANA and SAP’s Analytics.
“Just as they did with the cloud, Workday has incredible potential to again redefine HR and finance with AI, and I am thrilled to be part of that journey,” said Mr. Kazmaier. “Workday has the unique combination of a powerful AI platform and best-in-class applications to truly revolutionize the way we work. I look forward to joining my fellow Workmates and our valued partners as we unlock these opportunities for customers around the world.”
Workday is an AI platform that helps organizations manage their people and money. The platform is built with AI at the core to help customers elevate people, supercharge work, and move their business forward. Workday is used by more than 11,000 organizations around the world and across industries – from medium-sized businesses to more than 60 percent of the Fortune 500.
Related: A Look at Today’s Trends in Executive Search
Artisanal Talent focus is soley on b2b software, and the firm’s partners are specialists-only, who operate from VP to board, in product, engineering, finance, people, sales, marketing, and customer success.
Veteran Search Consultants
Mr. Johnson leads the firm’s product and engineering leaders practice. He previously spent six years at SPMB, rising from analyst to partner and established his own brand in the market for delivering high quality product and engineering search work for tier-1, high profile, VC backed and public companies. Over the past few years, Mr. Johnson has completed product and engineering searches for Airtable, Algolia, Cohesity, DocuSign, Databricks, Elastic, Figma, GitLab, Harness, Iterable, Looker, Loom, Marqeta, Mulesoft, New Relic, Postman, Productboard, Rubrik, Sendbird, ServiceNow, Splunk, Superhuman, Zuora, etc.
Executive Search in 2024: Challenges, Trends, and Hopes for a Hiring Resurgence in 2025
For many search firms in almost all industry segments, 2024 has been a tough year. There are many reasons for the recent downturn, and some firms have experienced a dip in revenues for even longer, according to Tim Tolan, founder, chairman, and managing partner of The Tolan Group. “Lots of changes are on the horizon for 2025 on the hiring front, and search firms are waiting with bated breath while hiring decisions are on hold, and draft fee agreements are (still) sitting in DocuSign waiting to be signed,” he said. “Decisions are dragging, as are active search engagements, as hiring managers and leaders struggle to make hiring decisions in the environment, we are all trying to navigate.”
In the Hunt Scanlon 2024 Executive Recruiting State of the Industry Report, the numbers reflected a double-digit downturn in demand for executive recruiting, with the private equity sector being the most affected. “We’ve seen and experienced that firsthand, but we feel positive changes are on the horizon,” Mr. Tolan said.
Dalton Becky is also a founder of the firm and leads the GTM practice. Over four years at SPMB, he executed more than 60 executive searches for some of the biggest names in the valley- ServiceNow, Hashicorp, Docusign, Mulesoft, and Forescout to name a few. Mr. Becky specializes in b2b GTM projects (marketing, sales, biz dev, and customer success) both at the VP and C-level.
Andy Price founded Artisanal Talent after executing more than 1,000 executive searches, mostly b2b GTM oriented, for companies including Snowflake, Databricks, Abnormal Security, and HashiCorp. He currently runs the firm’s venture capital business Artisanal Ventures. “My singular goal is to be the most useful shareholder to any founder in whom I invest, while building life long friendships,” Mr. Price said.
Chase Whittingham is co-founder of Artisanal and currently leads the firm’s customer success practice. He started his career in executive search at SPMB, where he worked directly under Mr. Price and was one of the fastest-promoted associates in the firm, completing close to 50 searches in two years.
Related: Venture Capital Reinvented: All Roads Lead to Talent
Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief and Dale M. Zupsansky, Executive Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
