#TalentBuzz

PandaDoc scaled their team to +800 people while being e.g. Inc. Magazine's 2022 -2021-2020 Best Workplaces & 2021 Forbes 500 Best Start Up Employer

In this week's #TalentBuzz I chat with their Chief People Officer Robin Corralez to learn more about their journey & how they have structured their recruitment team:

🐝 Teams in the US, Belarus, Manila, Ukraine, Portugal & Poland.

🐝 How are the teams structured, and does every country have a team lead?

🐝 How is PandaDoc measuring the success of their recruitment?

🐝 How do they make sure that employer branding & recruitment is aligned?

🐝 How to ensure a great candidate experience with such a big recruitment team?

🐝 How transparent processes do PAndaDoc have for hiring/decision-making in hiring?

🐝 What kind of technologies are you utilizing in your recruitment?

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In August 2022, Anna Gullstrand became the acting CEO of Mentimeter. 

Before that, she used to work as VP of People for the same company.

Now she’s again leading the people function.

What has she learned about running a SaaS company, and what has she changed as a people leader after that experience?

🐝 How did Anna end up leading Mentimeter?

🐝 What were the 6 months like as a CEO & what kind of feedback did Anna get from running the company?

🐝 Learnings & what Anna does differently now when you are leading your people & culture?

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How to ensure the success of your new team member by building an onboarding?

When you do this successfully, you get two things:

1. Better retention of people

2. People become profitable faster

I chat these topics with Sofia Sundbom, Chief People Officer at BIMobject.

🐝 Onboarding for different roles

🐝 Onboarding for your culture

🐝 How to evaluate the success of your onboarding?

🐝 Continuously adapting and learning as the company evolves

🐝 How can you implement this in an "MVP"/Agile approach to your onboarding?

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+4000 applications & NPS of 69 from the candidates: How to create a candidate experience like this?

I invited Grace Woods, Talent Acquisition Lead at Oneflow, to discuss these topics:

🐝 Why should companies care about their candidate experience?

🐝 How to collect feedback?

🐝 What creates the candidate experience in different stages?

🐝 How do you create a good experience for those you don’t even interview?

🐝 How to get the whole company to focus on candidate experience?

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Cooper Miller, Head of Tech Recruiting, EMEA at Uber, and we discuss the learnings from scaling their tech team:

🐝 How to build a successful engineering site?

🐝 How does culture differ in different sites & combine with the HQ culture?

🐝 How to make sure your strategy is aligned with the HQ?

🐝 You are doing a lot of relocations. How has this one changed your recruitment strategy?

🐝 Batched pool interviews 

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How to make talent acquisition a strategic business function?

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Heini Tuomola, Head of People & Culture at Visma, and we cover how talent acquisition can become a business-critical function:

🐝Does Talent Acquisition talk the same language with the organization?

🐝How to identify what an organization needs? No to “Yes yes” recruitment.

🐝What kind of skill sets do growing SaaS companies need?

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How to utilize SCARF model in recruitment?

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Arsaman Bahrami, Head of People at Precisely, and we break down the SCARF model and how you can take your recruitment to the next level with this.

SCARF stands for:

🐝 Status: We all want to stand out from the crowd and feel important, and in a recruitment process, our perceived status can be affected either positively or negatively.

🐝 Certainty, the C in the model. As humans, we naturally like to know what's going on and to have certainty about what will happen. In a recruitment process, a lack of certainty can affect our ability to perform.

🐝 Autonomy is our sense of control over events. In a recruitment process, the perceived control over the process and the power balance can often swing in favor of the recruiter or hiring manager.

🐝 Relatedness is the sense that we belong and are in the in-group. The ability to connect with others stands as one of the strongest motivators we have, but how can we use it to improve the recruitment process?

🐝 Fairness - the "F" in the SCARF model, which is a crucial but potentially damaging aspect of recruitment

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Learnings from scaling Blinkist to +200 employees 

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with the Founder & CEO of Blinkist about their talent acquisition journey. Here are the things we will cover in this episode:

🚀 Don’t be fooled by someone who seems to be great just because the average of applicants is low

🚀Sometimes you don't know what great looks like until you've seen it

🚀 The first employees you hire define your culture alongside with you

🚀 Active sourcing & building Talent Pipelines all the time.

🚀 Learning: hire a recruiter early on, and/or don't be afraid to spend money on recruiting agencies for high-impact roles.  

🚀Funding rounds: A, B & C rounds in 2016, 2017 & 2018 → How these affected the hiring at the time?

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Chris Savage, Founder & CEO of Wistia, joined me to share his learnings from scaling Wistia and his learnings around Talent Acquisition. Here are the things we discuss in the episode:

🐝 Work with people you want to have a meal with

🐝 Leading by example is one of the most underrated ways to scale an organization while minimizing process

🐝 You can't buy a world-class team; you have to build it

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Building your tech team off-shore might save a lot of money & resources, and it also brings some challenges.

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Faisal Amin, CTO of Upsy Shopping. We discuss how & why they have built their off-shore tech team.

Here are the things we will cover in this episode:

🚀Why Upsy decided to go with the off-shore team?

🚀How is the pricing compared to the Nordic markets?

🚀 Finding a great team?

🚀 Are team members on your payroll?

🚀 How to make sure transparency is there & you know what's going on?

🚀How to make sure there is an excellent culture fit?

🚀Is there challenges with languages if everyone doesn't speak English?

🚀 What does a hybrid team mean; time difference issues, cultural differences, communication ways?

🚀 How is managing a hybrid team different from entirely onsite?

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What it’s like to run 200 person engineering team in a fast-growing SaaS company?

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Mika Turunen, SVP of Product & Engineering from M-files, about the following topics: 

🚀Being a change leader: Why did M-files hire Mika?

🚀What kind of product is Mika’s team building & how is the team structured? 

🚀Bringing in new team members: going from broader to specific roles.

🚀What are M-files' favorite strategies for finding new team members?

🚀Combination of selling M-files to candidates & validating the candidates?

🚀Mika’s cooperation with your recruitment team: what are they responsible for, and what is Mika responsible for?

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Recruitment = sales & marketing. 

If that’s true, it means that recruitment could steal a thing or two from sales & marketing.

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Henri Nordström from Jobilla. We discuss what recruitment can steal from sales & marketing. 

Here are the things we will cover in this episode:

🚀Ideal-customer-profile = Ideal-candidate-profile

🚀Multi-channel outreach using various methods

🚀Selling your company for a candidate + How to make sure you don’t oversell

🚀When a candidate says no in the first outreach - Should you accept it, or can you turn it around?

🚀Conversion: application vs. lead generation

🚀Calling candidates vs. sending e-mails

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When and how to hire first People-role?

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Hanna Kontinen from Brella. We discuss hiring your first people person:

🚀You joined Brella in 2020. Was there some people person before you?

🚀Why do companies need a people person, and what do those people typically do?

🚀Before bringing in the first person, who should own that stuff? Should you do everything internally / use partners?

🚀How do you know you should bring in a people person? Is there a rule of thumb?

🚀HR / People / Recruitment / EB? Who should you bring in first?

🚀How would you approach the recruitment of first people person?

🚀How CEO should they measure the success of their first people person?

🚀When it’s time to scale the people team?

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You can make hiring more efficient when investing in Employer Branding.

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Tiina Hahtovirta from Fiksuruoka. We discuss Fiksuruoka’s Employer Branding journey. 

Here are the things we will cover in this episode:

🚀Why Fiksuruoka decided to start to invest in Employer Branding?

🚀How did Fiksuruoka start to work on Employer Branding internally? 

🚀When did they realize they needed an outside partner for Employer Branding?

🚀Partnering up with TalentBee: Was it hard to get internal buy-in from the management team?

🚀Building Employer Brand Strategy: What companies should keep in mind?

🚀Getting Fiksuruoka’s people to join Employer Branding content: Was it easy to get people excited?

🚀For people considering partnering up with TalentBee in Employer Branding: What would you say it’s like working with TalentBee?

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In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Matthijs Welle, CEO at Mews.

I saw his LinkedIn post a few months back, and it said:

“This month 51 recruitment agencies (yes I counted) reached out to me to try to work with Mews. 🤯 Looking back, I wish I had brought recruitment in-house earlier and stop our reliance on external agencies.”

I decided to invite Matthijs to chat more about this topic at #TalentBuzz

Here are the things we discuss:

🐝  Why Matthijs wishes that he had brought recruitment in-house earlier and stopped their reliance on external agencies

🐝 When they hired their first recruitment person & why?

🐝 Raising big funding round ( 185m$ C-round - Should you use an agency to hire faster?

🐝 Opening up new markets - Should you use a local partner?

🐝 When do you think you could outsource the recruitment? Or should you?

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Road to 200m$ acquisition from a talent acquisition point of view with Patrick Campbell, Founder & CEO of ProfitWell

Here are the things we will cover in this episode:

🚀 Does Dad have his pool already?

🚀 Memory-lane: First hire of ProfitWell

🚀 Let’s talk about churn. Employee churn. Best tips on avoiding it.

🚀Having a great personal & company brand: When this started to help in hiring?

🚀The thing you succeeded well in the ProfitWell journey around Talent Acquisition

🚀The thing you fucked up well in the ProfitWell journey around Talent Acquisition

🚀Sharing the merger with Paddle: Sharing the news & would you do something differently? Did someone leave because of this? Could you have avoided it?

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Talent Acquisition at GetAccept / Learnings from Samir Smajic, Founder & CEO

GetAccept is a digital sales room SaaS that empowers revenue team to increase winrates by engaging & understanding buyers from opportunity to signed deal.

They’ve been growing rapidly, and since their launch in 2015, they have grown to 190 people and raised +28m$ in funding.

I had a chance to sit down with their Founder & CEO, Samir Smajic, to go through their journey from a talent acquisition perspective. Here are the things we cover in this episode:

🐝 The importance of the founding team

🐝 Hiring the first employees - Utilizing networks

🐝 Funding rounds: B-round 20m$ in 2020 & A-round 7m$ in 2019 - How hiring changes when raising capital?

🐝 Biggest fuck-ups around talent acquisition

🐝 Building a leadership team

🐝 How GetAccept utilizes internal promotions?

🐝 How do you first international hires?

🐝 When founder should step out from hiring? Is Samir still participating in hiring decisions?

This was one of my favorite episodes, with many valuable lessons.

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The more you automate things in your recruitment process, the more you can focus on the most critical parts of the recruitment process.

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with David Näsström from Refapp. We discuss things you can automate in your recruitment process.

Here are the things we will cover in this episode:

🚀Ready-made templates / typeform for profile definitions

🚀Great templates for job ads - No need to start from scratch

🚀Build talent pools - No need to source new candidates all the time

🚀 Salespeople use tools like outreach to contact potential clients. Could we have something similar to recruitment?

🚀Ready-made templates/software for running an interviews

🚀Great ATS & templates for communication with the candidates

🚀Reference checks automated

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In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Timo Olkkola, Founder at Flowhaven, and we discuss the five learnings from their journey:

🐝 No one invests on the first date - everything is about partnerships

🐝 Meet persons as persons, not as their titles

🐝Prove local PMF before investing big when expanding

🐝 Don't forecast magic or make beliefs; building a great company takes hard work & more time than you think (and 10% luck)

🐝 As a founder, don't fool yourself - you always should and will come last

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Finding the right CFO is crucial for a SaaS company’s growth. Here’s how to recruit one.

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Niko Laine from Calqulate. We discuss how to recruit CFO for a SaaS company.

Here are the things we will cover in this episode:

🚀Why having a great CFO is crucial?

🚀When should a SaaS company hire its first CFO?

🚀Who should own Financial stuff before the first CFO?

🚀Different stages demand different CFOs? What’s the difference between seed-round & B-round CFO?

🚀How to identify the needed role of the CFO?

🚀 First-time hiring CFO: Should you outsource the recruitment process?

🚀What things should you validate during the recruitment process?

🚀As a SaaS CEO: How should you measure the success of a CFO?

🚀When should you change your CFO?

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Combining 2 SaaS companies means combining talent acquisition teams.

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with David McDonnell from Leadfeeder about what happened when they joined forces with Echobot.

Here are the things we will cover in this episode:

🚀Bringing in 2 teams together: What has been the biggest challenge?

🚀Business strategy → people strategy. Has it been hard when things are changing if there isn’t a clear business structure, e.g., are you bringing the brands together?

🚀Different recruitment processes into one.

🚀Employer branding when you still have two brands?

🚀 All the tools → How to merge these into one tech-stack

🚀 Recruiting culture-fit people when you suddenly have two cultures?

🚀 Figuring out what kind of talent you need next/overlapping talents?

🚀Better internal mobility with two companies

🚀 You are a remote-first company: What are the learnings on this when hiring people?

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In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talked with Ohad Parush from Gong on how Gong scaled their R&D team to +250 people. If you want to create one of the best tools in the world, you need to come up with new stuff all the time.

Here are the things we will cover in this episode:

🚀How Gong’s R&D team is structured?

🚀What’s your team day-to-day work like?

🚀How do you identify what kind of talents you need for your team?

🚀Are people joining the R&D team from inside of Gong or from outside?

🚀How is the cooperation between Ohad & Gong’s recruitment team?

🚀Having a well-known brand: Is recruitment easier?

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Structured career paths help your employees level up. This eventually leads to better retention & profitability to your business.

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Barbra Gago from Pando. We discuss how to use career frameworks to create structured career paths.

Here are the things we will cover in this episode:

🚀Benefits of career planning for companies

🚀What are career frameworks?

🚀Typical pitfalls in career planning/frameworks?

🚀ELTV = Employee Lifetime Value

🚀Typical levels in career growth - What’s a better version?

🚀Getting started in career planning

🚀TalentBee’s first version of salary-table: Let’s rip it apart.

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In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Karim Gharsallah from Recruitee. We discuss how to build a talent acquisition engine & cover the following topics:

🚀Settings things up and where to begin: basics first

🚀 Building the TA team

🚀 Principles in TA

🚀 TA Metrics

🚀 From operational recruitment to strategic

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When you become a CMO in a fast-growing SaaS company, it’s all about the team.

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Andrew Davies, CMO of Paddle. We discuss how his been scaling Paddle’s marketing team.

Here are the things we will cover in this episode:

🚀Joining a fast-growing SaaS company: How to evaluate the current team?

🚀How you started to approach bringing new people into the team?

🚀Combination of culture & skills?

🚀CMO’s cooperation with your recruitment team?

🚀 What are Andrew’s best tips on choosing the right people?

🚀Buying ProfitWell: Did Paddle merge two teams into one?

Make sure the subscribe to the podcast & to learn more; check out the following links:

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk about DEI with Hady Mendez from Slack. Here are the things we will cover in this episode:

🚀Introduction to DEI

🚀Benefits of DEI

🚀Why should companies have a DEI strategy?

🚀What does the director of equality do on day-to-day work?

🚀How to make sure DEI is part of recruitment?

🚀How should companies measure their DEI?

🚀What are Hady’s tips for companies starting to work on their DEI

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How Personio scaled their team in the Nordics?

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Maria Duni, Country Manager for Nordics from Personio. We discuss how they scaled their team in the Nordics.

Here are the things we will cover in this episode:

🚀What was Personio’s situation when Maria started 1,5 years ago?

🚀Raising 270m$ in 2021 & 200m$ in 2022 → How these have affected the Nordics hiring?

🚀How personio focuses on DEI in ther recruitment?

🚀Should you have a global or local recruitment teams?

🚀How Personio define’s what kind of people you are hiring?

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It’s hard to find senior salespeople. That’s why many companies have started to recruit junior salespeople & grow them to become professionals.

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Miika Kestilä from Meltwater. We discussed why they decided to focus on hiring junior salespeople.

Here are the things we will cover in this episode:

🚀Why has Meltwater decided to focus on hiring junior salespeople?

🚀What are the best sources for finding junior salespeople?

🚀Onboarding is crucial for success: How has Meltwater built this?

🚀What’s the biggest challenge when focusing on hiring junior people?

🚀Promoting people inside the organization: Meltwater’s rules for this?

🚀The benefits of deliberate organizational design - building career paths and thinking ahead

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How to build a culture & recruit people to that culture?

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Aref Abedi from Jobylon about culture & how to recruit culture-fit people.

Here are the things we will cover in this episode:

🚀 Happiness Culture at Jobylon → What is that?

🚀 Why building a culture is important & why Jobylon ended up focusing on that?

🚀 What are the actions Aref takes as a leader to ensure their culture goes to the right way?

🚀 How to recruit people who fit the culture?

🚀 How to validate candidates for culture? Tests? Questions?

🚀How Jobylon talks about its culture in Employer Branding?

🚀 How to use Referrals for culture-fit recruitments?

🚀 How has Jobylon built its salary model around culture?

🚀 How culture affects retention?

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How to scale your SaaS business to +100 employees?

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Mikko Honkanen from Vainu. We discuss learnings from scaling Vainu to +100 employees.

Here are the things we will cover in detail:

🚀What has been the most challenging part of finding great talent?

🚀Taking in juniors & onboarding them well

🚀How has Vainu decided who to hire & when?

🚀Development & growth of people as a strategic decision

🚀How Vainu makes sure you recruit culture-fit people?

🚀Does Mikko participate in recruitment as a CEO of Vainu?

🚀Learnings from opening new markets & finding the right people

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Hiring your first employee in a SaaS Start-up? Here’s what to keep in mind.

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Tommi Huovinen from Introist. We discuss hiring your first employees in a SaaS Start-up.

Here are the things we will cover in detail:

🚀Introist founding team & how they decided to launch the company

🚀When they realized they needed first employees?

🚀Getting their first funding to hire people.

🚀How to decide what kind of person you need as a first hire?

🚀Introist hiring criteria: Founder-like.

🚀Salary vs. equity when hiring

🚀 Specialist vs. generalist when hiring

🚀 Their process of hiring the first employee

🚀Going towards your seed round & building a talent pipeline

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Struggling with scaling your team to 20 people?

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Aku Pöllänen from Aatos.app. We discussed how they scaled their team to the first 20 employees.

Here are the things we will cover in detail:

🚀 They founded Aatos in 2018 but moved to full-time in 2020. What was the point when they decided to go all in?

🚀 How many founders were they?

🚀When they realized that they needed the first employee

🚀There’s no room for free riders. Hire only the best. How do they ensure this?

🚀 Equity isn’t salary. Why do you need to pay a competitive salary?

🚀Recruitment takes a lot of time → This seems surprising for many founders.

🚀What was the difference in hiring the first employee vs the tenth employee?

🚀Is Aku still participating in hiring decisions as a CEO?

🚀What’s been their biggest fuck up regarding recruitments?

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Combining three companies. How does this affect recruitment & employer branding?

In this week's #TalentBuzz, I talk with Johanna Rauhala from Haiilo. Haiilo was established when COYO (Germany), Smarp (Finland), and Jubiwee (France) joined forces.

How does all this affect recruitment & employer branding? We covered these topics in our episode:

🚀Suddently your brand name isn’t that well-known in the market. How does this affect Employer Branding & recruitment?

🚀 Turning three different recruitment processes into one.

🚀All the tools → How to merge these into one tech stack?

🚀Internal communications when sharing the news about the merger. What’s important?

🚀Combining three cultures → How to make sure people stay.

🚀Figuring out what kind of talent you need next/overlapping talents?

🚀What were the most significant challenges & successes during this process?

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