Our Client is an international, market leader, dynamically growing telecommunication company, having their CEE headquarter in Budapest as well as more than 120 local representative offices all around Hungary, counting over 1300 staff.

Finding a new Head of HR

Our search was highly confidential from the very beginning given that the Regional Managing Director wanted to replace the previous HR Head to someone who possessed stronger and more complex people management skills and had extensive experience with compensation and benefit development. The Hungarian HR organization was a decent sized one with 28 heads (reporting into the Head of HR through 4 managers) and was not performing well unfortunately, so besides putting a strong focus on the comp&benefit area the new Head of HR had to do a lot of work around setting up a new, sophisticated KPI system to make sure that the performance of each HR sub-area could become measurable and more transparent. A further important part of the plan was to make some changes in the HR team, introduce performance management where necessary and explore some cost-saving / cost-efficiency potentials as well.

Headhunting / search methods

Wyser Hungary created and presented a detailed hiring strategy to the Regional Managing Director, which included a complex headhunting campaign focusing on large, multinational B2C service provider (ideally telecommunication services) companies in order to find the most competent and motivated candidates on the market.

It was crucial that the shortlist had to include candidates possessing the following experience & background mix / portfolio: University degree in Economics/ HR Management, minimum of 8-10 years of experience in HR management in a complex, multinational B2C business environment along with a proven track record in successful compensation & benefit management. Furthermore, the successful candidate had to have experience in managing larger HR organisations of at least 15-20 FTEs and be able to drive a positive change simultaneously from a performance and a “cultural” perspective too. Fluent English was also an absolute must-have.

After carefully assessing / understanding the Client’s needs, Wyser set a candidate generation timeline of 4 weeks, then another 3 weeks were calculated for 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd round interviews at the Client along with an extensive online personality testing procedure for applicants making it to the 2^nd round at least. Wyser successfully met the deadline and presented a shortlist of 7 stand-out Head of HR candidates to the Regional Managing Director in 3,5 weeks. All 7 candidates were brought to the 1^st round interview, out of which 4 candidates made it to the 2^nd round (and all these 4 candidates were personality-tested) and the top 2 candidates were selected for the final (3^rd) interview that eventually took place in the Wyser office (our biggest board room was booked for the Client for the whole day).

Successful Placement

As a result of the consultants’ thorough research of Hungary’s B2C telco industry, it was confirmed to Wyser that both candidates who attended the final round interview could have been offered the job. One of them was eventually selected and offered 2 days after the last round. Even though the chosen candidate received a very competitive counter-offer at their current place, Wyser assisted the offer stage very closely and ensured the candidate’s confidence in rejecting that counter-offer and accepting the package / opportunity offered by the Client. After the successful Head of HR candidate started at the Client, Wyser kept in fortnightly touch with the candidate up until the end of the probation period to follow the onboarding process and ensure proper placement aftercare, providing continuous feedbacks both to the Client and the candidate.