“We couldn’t have found similar talent on our own” - Markus Ritala, Group Product Manager, M-Files.

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M-Files found themselves in a tricky situation - one of their product owners had decided to leave the team, and the current team was full of work. They had done these recruitments by themselves earlier, but now the market for cloud product owner’s was getting harder. Normal outreach & publishing a job ad wasn’t enough and they wanted to try out a new approach with TalentBee.

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“I had just done a few similar recruitments myself, but now I found myself without having time to do this recruitment. I also felt like I couldn’t find any more suiting candidates for the role, so we decided to partner up with TalentBee.” -Markus Ritala, Group Product Manager, M-Files.

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M-Files is one of Finland's most well-known and respected SaaS companies, established in 1987, and they have worked with many recruitment agencies over the years - Why did they decide to partner up with TalentBee on this search?

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“We have worked with many agencies during my time at M-Files. I had followed TalentBee for a while and enjoyed their new approach with super open communications. Our product organization has +100 employees and it’s a world-class product team. - we wanted to work with someone who is an expert in SaaS companies and has experience in product roles to make sure it stays that way. I decided to give TalentBee a chance, and I’m happy I did so.” - Seija Suoniemi, Talent Acquisition Lead, M-Files

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Starting from the profile definition,

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When someone leaves a company, there’s an easy way to find a similar person who left. That’s a big mistake. This is a situation where you can stop for a while and really think about what’s going on in your business, where the bottlenecks are, and what kind of person can help you solve those problems.

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In the M-Files situation, we identified that this was the situation:

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✅ Product owner will own the cloud service (product) and lead the development roadmap, an essential core function

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✅ Product owner will shape the future of the cloud service and how it fits the customers’ changing needs → Further develop the product into a cloud-native solution

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✅ Experience on cloud services (SaaS) & Technical knowledge of Azure & Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

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✅ Wants to communicate with multiple stakeholders, can communicate techy backlog to non-techy people, enjoys working with various stakeholders

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We quickly understood that this is quite a challenging role to fill. We will also need to focus a lot on finding the unique selling points for this role - most likely, the person we are looking for is already working somewhere and are happy with their position. Why someone like that would change the working place?

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Here’s how you can look at that and find your differentiation factors:

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During the profile definition, we always create a priority list and ensure we are aligned with these before starting the actual search for the role - this saves so much time for both the customer and us.

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Starting the search

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We had identified from the beginning that this is a hard-to-fill role, so we mainly focused on headhunting on this project. We also did a job ad and some recruitment marketing around this, but the hired candidate was found through headhunting.

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We created a list of 20 potential candidates from this role that fit the search criteria and contacted all of them with personalized videos. On the videos, we focused on the following:

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1. The candidate's current situation
2. Why we think they would be a good fit for this role
3. What’s in it for them

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Candidate experience is the key.

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Creating a good candidate experience is so important. We want to ensure that all the candidates we contact and those we talk to have an excellent experience of the M-Files recruitment process..

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They are a growth company, and they will be hiring many people in the future as well - This is a great starting point for building up a talent pipeline of the candidates.

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Here’s the feedback we got about the process from Matias, who was hired as a product owner in this search:

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“The recruitment process was AWESOME. Every step has been personalized, to my pleasant surprise, from the first contact on LinkedIn all the way to the job offer & growth plan. You can be proud of how great a recruitment process you have created - typically, companies don’t handle these this well. I'd say this was the best recruitment process I’ve participated in during my career.” -Matias Pokkinen, Product Owner, M-Files.

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And that’s a great place to end this story. If you ever need a talent acquisition partner who takes your candidate experience to the next - feel free to reach out to us 🙌

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