Founding Chairman – Brendan J. Whyte

When Trixie and I left her Mum’s recruitment business (Linkstaff) in August 2000, we weren’t sure what we would do next.  We spent a weekend with friends in Hong Kong cooling off and soul searching on what our next step should be.  We considered going back to the UK to find work there but decided that in essence, we had the blue print for an executive search business.  After all we had introduced these services at Linkstaff and they had been quite successful.  After consulting with Jenny Gutierrez, Mharicar Castillo and 2 other members of Linkstaff’s staff (all hired by us I should point out), we decided to set up our own executive recruitment business.

We obviously had to start with a name and I was keen to fall back on to my Latin studies and to somehow incorporate some Latin into the name.  The intention was to add some ‘gravitas’ or intellectual snobbery to the company.  Having trawled the internet for a Latin dictionary I was able to find 2 words that had nice, relevant English translations, (i) ‘quaerito’ – to seek and (ii) ‘qualitas’ – quality. 

We liked the idea of the ‘to seek quality’ motif as it was what we intended doing with respect to finding our employees, our candidates and our clients.  However, we did realize that to call the company ‘Quaerito Qualitas’ would be confusing (people might think we were an extreme, traditional religious sect with links to the Inquisition) and so we played around with the Q’s and looked at ‘Q-squared’ but we felt that this was too ‘dot-com’ like.  We then considered Q2, which while sounding a little like the world’s greatest rock band (U2 of course) had a nice ring to it and so that was it….the company became known as ‘Q2 Search Inc.’  The Search was included to make it obvious what the company did.  Too many international headhunters sound like law offices, so we wanted candidates and clients to be well aware of what Q2 did.

So in September of 2000, Q2 started operations from the spare room in our house in San Lorenzo Village in Makati with 6 staff, 2 desks, 1 computer, 1 telephone, 1 fax and a golden retriever.

In November of 2000 we moved into our office in Suite 901, 88 Corporate Center.  The company has since then grown from strength to strength.  We now have four distinct divisions and have 4 separate office locations with over 80 employees.

The rest, as they say, is history!

Brendan J. Whyte
Founding Chairman
Q2 HR Solutions