Product Marketing Recruitment Case Study from Marketing Moves

Head of Product Marketing Manager Recruitment

Consultant: David Holton, Director of Americas
Sector: SOC as a Service, Cybersecurity
Role: Head of Product Marketing Manager
Location: Sunnyvale, California, United States

Overview

After experiencing strong growth over a two year period to become a recognized as a global leader in Cyber security, a major (SOC)-as-a-service company had an immediate need to hire a top tier Head of Product Marketing Manager to build a world class marketing team.

About the Company

Founded in just 2012, Arctic Wolf Networks (AWN) is a leading security operations center (SOC)-as-a-service company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Known for its world class leadership and technical prowess, AWN provides companies with the best available cybersecurity operations to detect or identify and respond to threats.

AWN is more affordable by providing every customer with a Security Operations Center (SOC), delivered as a cloud-based service and staffed by security experts. Utilizing SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) technology, AWN Cyber-SOC provides the highest level of SOC-as-a-service by optimizing the integration of machine and human which can be deployed in minutes.

The Role

Reporting to the VP Marketing, a few of the proven requirements needed to be successful as Head of Product Marketing candidates were:

Leadership: build, retain and motivate team members
8+ years of software/SaaS product marketing experience including 2-3 years in security applications, preferably SIEM. Strong grasp of enterprise IT infrastructure
Positioning & messaging, Sales Enablement, Content Creation, Market Analysis, Pricing/Packaging, and Product evangelism and much more

The Challenge

Before turning to Marketing Moves, AWN had conducted their own in-house search for a Head of Product Marketing. Without an established network created over almost 30 years, they quickly found that within a competitive job market, many candidates that were interested in the role did not have the “must have” skills that Arctic Wolf required. Despite this and the fact that the qualification of top candidates was time consuming, AWN managed to identify a small number of candidates who made it to the final rounds of interviews.

However, when it came down to the offer stage, more than one candidate indicated that they were looking for an opportunity with a greater immediate reward. This type of in-house recruitment scenario is not uncommon and many times, it is the lack of qualifying and fully preparing candidates that can derail a critical search.

Solution

Because Marketing Moves works globally with Technology companies of all sizes, we regularly place senior marketing candidates who then become clients. Having this trusted relationship means they can rely on us to not only understand marketing and untapped candidate resources, but also have a strong understanding of the company’s culture and expectations.

As Arctic Wolf had an immediate need to fill this role, our Director of Americas David Holton began coordinating with the VP Marketing at Arctic Wolf. Marketing Moves was able to fully understand the requirements, identify and find a solution making sure that moving forwards, there would be no unforeseen surprises when extending an offer to the best candidate.

Any candidate that Marketing Moves presented would need to meet and exceed all of Arctic Wolf’s most critical requirements. Additionally, it was up to Marketing Moves to set the correct expectations of the role to the candidate – and then, reconfirm those expectations.

Process

To fulfil Arctic Wolf’s “must have” list, Marketing Moves developed a profile of companies which would employ qualified candidates. Based on this profile, an action plan was developed. Given that Arctic Wolf was a smaller company that many qualified and competent candidates may have not yet heard of, it was important that we were able to sell the company, technology, leadership and overall opportunity. It was up to us to make sure that we sold the big picture not just the salary.

Like all searches, our action plan included extensive use of networking and referrals for this search focusing on security organizations, associations, database mining, and social media. Another important element in the success of this search was that the client made the commitment to respond quickly with candidate submissions. Without Arctic Wolf’s active participation, the best candidates would not wait around for weeks of decision making.

Outcome

Within a week, Marketing Moves had identified, qualified and submitted candidates to Arctic Wolf and interviews were soon scheduled. AWN was also very responsive in providing interview feedback to Marking Moves which helped retain candidates who had the ability and genuine interest in the role. Once Arctic Wolf selected the successful candidate, Marketing Moves assisted in the negotiated of the offer which the candidate accepted without any unexpected surprises or requirements. In total, the time from initiation of the search to close was just 3.5 weeks – a fantastic result.