Case story: Why and at what growth stage did Fiksuruoka – Foodello decide to start investing in Employer Branding?

“At Fiksuruoka we are expanding towards new markets as Foodello: we have opened our online-store in the Netherlands and Belgium, and an office in Amsterdam,” smiles Tiina Hahtovirta, CHRO of Fiksuruoka.

While expanding their important mission of reducing food waste internationally, Fiksuruoka is making sure to be able to do two things:

• Build their group-level and existing teams in Finland and new teams also internationally
• Engage their current employees and strengthen the community internally when the team is divided into several countries

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Fiksuruoka has a strong consumer brand in Finland that their customers absolutely love, but they still needed to start strengthening their employer brand for future-proof international growth, too.

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Choosing the right employer branding partner from two options

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First, Tiina and Jessica Salminen in her People team started gathering forces internally: their branding team was a help for them to begin to think about how to activate employer branding.

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“Internally, we had discussions about whether it’s smart for us to start investing in EB even if we’re not yet recruiting heavily.”

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“We made the first draft of our employer branding strategy internally, but soon realized that we would need some helping hands with content creation and converting the strategy into results. For our branding team this is of course an everyday job, but our brand team is fairly busy with the consumer brand activities and we needed extra hands to help us reach our targets,” Tiina sees.

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Tiina and Jessica started to look for a suitable partner to start collaboration with in weekly employer branding actions. They were considering between agencies and freelancers to help with the content.

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“Internally, we had some discussions about whether it’s smart for us to start investing in EB in the first place, even if we’re not yet recruiting heavily. From TalentBee’s Siiri we got help in our decision and made sure that yes, it’s exactly the right time to start creating awareness before it gets super busy with the recruiting,” Tiina says.

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What things influenced the choice of a partner?

In the end of their decision process, Fiksuruoka came to the conclusion that they wanted to have an agile partner that:

• Could adjust to their needs as an internationally growing company
• Could reassess their employer branding strategy to see if it has the right focus points in it
• Could help with the ongoing employer branding activities such as content creation
• Would be a cultural match: Fiksuruoka gives a lot of value to data, results and piloting, so the partner should have this data-driven approach, too.

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“When we asked TalentBee if we could pilot the EB actions they recommended, and the answer was yes, I thought this is a match! Also offering us options to go with the stage of our company, and being agile with them made it easier for us to buy,” Tiina says.

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Already the planning phase of employer branding can support employee engagement internally

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Fiksuruoka and TalentBee started an EB collaboration in fall 2022 with reassessing the EB strategy and making an agile action plan. Next steps were updating the career page, creating content, publishing it on SoMe, evaluating it based on data, and continuing to build their employer brand as a continuous, data-driven process.

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👉 Follow Fiksuruoka–Foodello's EB actions on LinkedIn

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👉 Fiksuruoka's updated career site

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“This whole EB process doesn’t have to be just HR mumbo jumbo.”

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“One of the best things so far has been the excellent internal workshop we had with TalentBee. The workshop itself was an eye opener for us: this whole EB process doesn’t have to be just HR mumbo jumbo. It can be part of reaching the EB targets itself. The discussions in the workshop already helped us engage our current people, and realize that they are actually super proud of working here”, Tiina says.

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Three facts about Tiina and Fiksuruoka’s process of deciding to invest in EB:

• They had to start investing in creating awareness in the talent audience to reach the best talent in tech, marketing, procurement and customer service. This would support hiring the right talent critical for their growth.
• Employer branding would also support strengthening their internal community when the teams expand to different countries. This would support retention of talent.
• They wanted to have a data-driven approach to EB, a partner that understands their business stage and growth targets, and can help with the whole cycle of EB activation from strategy to content – and for these things they found TalentBee.

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What kind of results did Fiksuruoka get from the employer branding pilot with us?

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The pilot started in the beginning of November by starting to create and publish content on Fiksuruoka's updated career site as well as the company LinkedIn page. The goal for the pilot was to collect data about: Does this kind of an approach bring results in starting to grow the awareness about Fiksuruoka as an employer?

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I have been so happy that we've had great concrete employer branding material to post on our LinkedIn and career site. It is not always wise to do everything yourself, but ask a professional to help you. This way our team has also more time to focus on other important topics and responsibilities. - Jessica Salminen, HR Manager at Fiksuruoka

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The results of the content pilot after 2 weeks

• 49 new Linkedin followers gained
• Impressions grew from 0 to 11K
• Engagement rate >5,5 % both weeks, when a good level is often considered as 2–4%
• The total of 1643 views on your updated career page, 628 unique visitors
• 272 views for the published blog posts
• The total of 338 likes on the posts on Linkedin

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On top of the numerical results, there were a lot of positive, spontaneous feedback about the employer brand activation from the audience.

For example, a comment on Fiksuruoka's Linkedin post came from a Procurement professional living in the Netherlands, with 5+ years of experience. This is exactly the talent audience that Fiksuruoka wants to reach. Building talent networks on social media is indeed strategic use of social platforms. For example, reaching a profile like this through headhunting could cost to you up to €15K.

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The outcome of the pilot for Fiksuruoka

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Employer brand growth marketing and this approach seem to work for Fiksuruoka – Foodello:

• We started to implement the employer branding plan by posting content on social media 2 times / week and on the career site blog 2 times / month.
• Going on with this plan for 2 weeks led to these initial stage results.

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→ It is obvious, that investing in these actions also in the future will bring results and strengthen the employer brand.

As an outcome Fiksuruoka decided to start investing in employer branding on an ongoing basis and continue collaborating with us in the Q1 / 2023.

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Do you want to hear more about our Employer Branding services? Let’s have a chat!