Client: a boutique PE technology advisory firm, London-headquartered, building its US team.
The brief
A PMO lead to run the control tower on large technology carve-outs for private equity sponsors: the person holding the plan together across workstreams, sequencing Day 1 and driving TSA exit. The client wanted someone who had personally run programmes of that scale, not someone who had governed them from a distance.
What we did
We ran an advertised campaign alongside direct search, screening around 200 applications and building a qualified pipeline of 24 candidates for the client’s carve-out roles. Applications alone do not answer the question that matters here, so every candidate was tested on the same points: what they personally owned, what went wrong on the programme, and what they changed as a result.
What we found
Most people who describe themselves as carve-out PMO leads have coordinated a plan rather than owned one. The difference shows within two questions, and it is the difference between a Day 1 that holds and one that does not.
The outcome
After the interview, a founding partner asked for the offer to be issued immediately, which the client’s talent acquisition lead said she had never seen before. The candidate accepted and has since joined, eight weeks from instruction.