Case Study - Mark Pitts

Submitted By: Swati Kumar (18PGDM052)

A Brief about the case:

‘Peoplestreet’ is a firm incubated by Cambridge Incubator that provided secure and private
relationship channel. They aimed to provide a platform in which people can store and share
their updated personal details with the selected list of people they wish to share with. In other
words, they aimed to provide a platform for professional relationships. The CEO of the
company Mr.Alper Caglyan had to fill three main positions of VP of Business Development,
VP of Marketing and VP of Engineering. He was looking forward to hire a VP of Business
Development and had identified a candidate- Mark Pitts. Mark was interviewed by Mornell,
Kuflan and Dunphy. Caglayan was still not sure whether Mark was a right choice for the VP
position and went on to use some recruiting interview strategies and had to finally make a
decision on analysis of the findings.

My Key Learning from the Case are:

 It is very essential to identify the right job position to be filled first, in a start-up set up
 The Talent Acquisition team or the CEO or in combination needs to identify and
make note of the right set of characteristics the company and the job role would
require in the candidate
 It is vital to understand the right set of duties and responsibilities the company would
require from the person in that job position and in accordance of which the JD should
be built up
 If there are additions in the team who is responsible to fill a job vacancy, the first and
the most important thing is to update the new team member with every vital
information related to the filling of the job role and explaining the right need of the
candidate and JD to the new team member
 It is also important to understand the CEO of the company’s need and expectations
from the Job position (mostly in case the Job position to fill is of higher level)
 The proportion of candidates the TA team needs to approach to for filling the job role
needs to be much higher than the final interviewing number, as they might be
eliminated by the initial rounds or also, there will be a chance to lose out on good
candidates if the number of initial list of candidates is closed with a minimal number
of 10-15 candidates and the others are then restricted to apply
 One needs to use all the different mediums (if required) to search for candidates and
not restrict oneself to any one medium
 The panellist in the interview need to beforehand discuss what is the most important
criteria and characteristics that they are looking for and then begin with the interview
 It is essential for the interviewers to be on the same page before the process starts
 Deciding on the interviewing strategy beforehand in accordance with the job role
required by the company is a wise choice to be made by the recruiters