Kilpatrick Case Study - Head of Product Management

BullGuard is a global company, headquartered London (UK) with offices all over the world. Launched in 2002, BullGuard is one of the fastest growing Internet and mobile security brands. Today, its product portfolio also includes award-winning PC and mobile backup software solutions. 

BullGuard sees the input of all employees as a key element in keeping the company well run and competitive. Ideas are welcomed, encouraged, and put into practice. This always gives people a feeling of achievement, self-confidence and motivates them to do even better. Their management has always paid a great deal of attention to the way people feel about their work and the company. It has been recognized that if people are treated well and believe in what they do, that sense of mission will stay with them for a very long time, and benefits the company immensely. This translates into a very informal, down-to-earth relationship between managers and team members. The company’s philosophy is to combine technical excellence with a genuine understanding of consumer needs, creating simple, easy to use products that deliver complete protection as well as enabling customers to control and manage their digital footprint.

In September 2012 Kilpatrick Executive Search Romania was chosen by BullGuard to fill the position of Head of Product Management for their office in Bucharest, Romania. As a result of the company’s growing business and expansion in the product portfolio, this was a newly created role. The role reports directly to the company’s COO, being an extremely important and highly visible employee within BullGuard. In essence, the Head of Product Management is responsible for defining products to meet consumer needs.

Together with Kilpatrick’s Consultants it has been agreed to have an executive search project to find and attract the best candidates available on the market. This type of project involves a careful search and approach process with all the candidates suitable for the role, both from competing companies, as well as other IT companies that have this profile in their organizational chart.

The requirements were very specific: industry knowledge, experience in the security software environment or familiarity with the B2C environment, and knowledge on software development or software release. The client also expected to see senior professionals, highly experienced people in Product Management roles, as well as experienced English users. These requirements narrowed our search to few companies available on the Romanian market.

Two Kilpatrick Executive Search Consultants, both with previous experience in executive search IT projects, managed the project. The main strategy for the project was direct search. Approach, attraction and selection were done either by email, phone discussions and face-to-face interviews. Face-to-face interviews were based on a competencies list defined during the first briefing with the client. Due to the nature of this project and the type of profiles searched, the technical part of the interviewing process was done exclusively by the client. BullGuard and Kilpatrick managed together the negotiation and hiring part.

As mentioned, after a first briefing with the client the profile of the ideal candidate was established, with the main required technical and business skills, as well as key competencies required for the role. Regarding the candidate’s personal profile (soft skills) BullGuard gave us a few personality traits that helped us better understand the BullGuard employee profile. After three weeks of intensive search and in depth-interviews with candidates, we successfully managed to send a short list of 9 profiles with evaluated candidates, as initially agreed. In the next two weeks our client successfully managed to have two rounds of interviews, first with the 9 candidates and afterwards with the 4 selected finalists. From this point one candidate was chosen, the most suitable for the company’s needs. 

The difficult part started when we found out that the most suitable candidate had an anti-compete clause included in his labor contract. This type of clause usually doesn’t allow employees to join a competing company in a similar role. From this point on, BullGuard and Kilpatrick joined their efforts to support the candidate to deal with this issue. A legal point of view was required by both companies in order to analyze the facts and to find a solution. BullGuard showed openness and interest in supporting the candidate to prepare a “battle plan”. After several weeks of discussions and sounding, our candidate succeeded to get the final approval, by convincing his current employer to deactivate the clause without any claims.

During this project BullGuard proved to be a very professional partner, with high expectations and standards for quality, being very reliable and supportive at the same time.