Ellie.ai’s challenge: navigating the complexities of tech recruitment

Founded by Johannes Hovi and Jari “Jaffa” Jaanto, Ellie.ai has been at the forefront of innovation in the tech industry. However, recruiting the right talent, especially for senior technical roles, posed a significant challenge. 

The lack of internal talent acquisition capabilities and the need to make the company more attractive in the talent market necessitated a new approach after Ellie AI’s Seed funding round.

The goal was to scale the Tech team and GTM teams fast and founders needed to prioritize their times to other things as well.

“Senior tech-roles are really difficult to fill due to so few candidates; basically we couldn’t get enough people to the interviews. And then we had some quality issues with the candidates we were able to talk with. TalentBee has the first interviews with candidates now to save a lot of our time.”  -Johannes Hovi

Johannes highlights these reasons when he chose the partner from 3 great options: Talented, Finders Seekers & TalentBee

✅ ”TalentBee is still quite small, and I assumed that they are more customer-oriented rather than us being “just one of their customers” – this has proven to exactly how I assumed and we are really important customer to TalentBee. I can really see this in how the partnership is handled.”

✅ ”I liked the flexibility offered during sales discussions on what the final service would look like. We are a start-up and situations might change fast. TalentBee was extremely flexible with building a package that fits perfectly for our needs.”

✅ ”TalentBee is focused on helping scaling SaaS companies in talent acquisition. I had a chance to talk with one of their customers with similar situation and they only had good things to say about TalentBee.”

TalentBee: more than just a recruitment agency

Ellie.ai sought a partner that could blend seamlessly into their team and provide comprehensive support in talent acquisition and employer branding. TalentBee filled this role perfectly, with a representative working closely aligned with Ellie’s goals and culture.

“TalentBee provides Ellie AI a holistic service, dividing their time between recruitment and employer branding. This dual approach not only streamlined the hiring process but also started to open up long-term talent pipelines for Ellie.ai.” - Johannes Hovi

Here are some examples of the things we have done in the employer branding side of things:

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Impact and results: a forward-looking partnership

The collaboration has led to significant improvements in Ellie.ai’s recruitment process. TalentBee's embedded approach has enhanced communication and understanding of Ellie.ai’s needs, leading to a better flow of interviews and improved candidate quality. Their presence at Ellie.ai's office has fostered ad-hoc discussions and ideas, enriching the overall hiring strategy.

So far TalentBee has helped Ellie AI to hire the following people to their team:

✅Senior Fullstack Developer with Team lead experience

✅Product Manager

✅Senior Fullstack Developer with niche 2D web graphics experience

✅Support for go to market recruitments such as Sales Development Rep and Inside Sales Rep

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“Collaboration with Talentbee has been very human-centric, knowledgeable, and swift. What has worked well is that we are constantly on the same wavelength and understand each other. It has been interesting to learn a lot of new things from recruitment professionals.” Jari “Jaffa” Jaanto, CTO & Co-founder, Ellie AI

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And some other small projects we have finished with Ellie:

✅Helped with clarifying the recruitment process for technical roles

✅Sparring about the product development team structure and roles for the future

And here are some exciting things we have done and results we have got on the employer branding side:

✅ Held an employer branding workshop with the employees at the Ellie office to collect some valuable first hand information about Ellie’s employee experience. This information was used to draft an employer branding playbook for Ellie’s employer brand positioning, goals and key communication themes.

✅ Created a content calendar with a consistent flow of inspiring EB content and started to implement that in Q3/2023. 

✅ As a result, Ellie got almost 100 new followers on Linkedin during October 2023 – including 30 people in engineering & IT. Employee stories are especially performing nicely: an employee story posted in October post got 1397 impressions (organically, no ads budget used), 37 clicks with 2,65 % CTR (click-through-rate, Linkedin average 1,5 %) and 4,8 % engagement rate (Linkedin average 3 %). Building content like this on a weekly basis helps to get a growing trend for Ellie’s social media following and traffic generated for their careers page.

✅ Created a plan to update Ellies’ career page. New version of their career page with valuable content for the talent audience was launched in November 2023.

Johannes describes TalentBee as forward-looking, innovative, and flexible, aligning well with Ellie.ai’s values. The partnership has not only helped in streamlining the recruitment process but also in making Ellie.ai more attractive to potential candidates, and impacting the company’s growth positively.

Johannes shared that he has received positive feedback about the visibility of Ellie's brand on social media. Also Ellie’s CTO Jaffa commented in the beginning of November:

“The effort put in employer branding can already be seen as increased inquiries about career opportunities and open positions I have received from industry experts on Linkedin.”

Jaffa's own social media impressions and visibility have also grown due to content produced about Ellie’s tech and product development news, practices, team and roadmap.

Here are the top 3 things working with TalentBee according to Ellie’s team:

✅ The people and the commitment

✅ The flexibility and customer-orientation

✅ And the fluid process that is adapted based on what’s important to you