Search
Director, Telecommunications Products
Organization
Internet Start-up Company
Situation
This US based Internet company was building a marketing infrastructure to support their service launch in the Canadian marketplace. The client had been referred to The ExeQfind Group’s Toronto office by a business colleague and was looking for a search partner that would be capable of sourcing a broad range of senior management staff. It was also critical that the search partner have the resources and relationships with high caliber candidates to sell them on an opportunity with an unknown start-up.
Assesment
This venture represented a relatively new concept involving essential yet low interest services. The business model was based on aggregating a suite of essential services including telecommunications, gas, electricity etc., creating a buying group and selling these services at discounted rates to their membership. The concept was consumer focused and, aside from direct to consumer sales, builders and property managers and associations and affinity groups were targeted in order to bring on large numbers of customers quickly.
Challenge
As telecommunication services were to be the lead products for the fast-approaching Canadian launch, the candidate would have to have intimate knowledge of competitive service offerings and develop superior product offerings for the launch. They would have to be adept at building and presenting business cases for potential service wholesalers/providers and have a very broad knowledge of voice, data, and land and mobile products in anticipation of future product offerings.
Solution
Within 3 weeks, a slate of 4 candidates was presented to the General Manager in Canada and subsequently interviewed by the US CEO as well. As the US was in the process of conducting a parallel search and the Canadian candidates were considered to be significantly superior to the US sourced candidates, the client elected to hire the two lead Canadian candidates. The product portfolio was split between voice and data products and each of the candidates was given North American responsibility rather than strictly Canadian.
Candidate
Both selected candidates had broad based backgrounds in telecommunications having worked in product development and marketing for voice and data products as well as land and mobile products. Both candidates also had strong combinations of technical expertise and marketing experience.
Postmortem
The performance by our team in Toronto on this initial search led to being awarded the searches for a Director of Business Development, Director of Marketing, Director of Energy Products, Director of Sales and Director of Customer Service – all of which were recruited and in place within a 3 month time span. As well, the caliber of the Canadian candidates was consistently so high that they immediately became involved in key activities with the US parent company.