How Rakettitiede differentiates from competitors with employer branding

In today's competitive job market, attracting and retaining top talent is a major challenge for growth companies in any industry. Rakettitiede (The Rocket Science), a Finnish IT consulting firm, recognized this challenge and wanted to differentiate from competitors by investing in its employer brand.

However, in a saturated market where all companies tend to appear the same, developing a unique employer brand can be difficult.

In this blog post, we explore the challenges Rakettitiede faced in standing out from competitors, the benefits of working with an employer branding partner, their criteria for choosing a partner, and how the partnership with TalentBee has helped Rakettitiede work towards its employer branding goals.

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Differentiating from competitors with a unique approach

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Like its competitors, Rakettitiede has faced a challenge in differentiating as a brand in the IT consulting market. In this saturated market where companies tend to appear very similar, it's challenging to create a unique brand identity. However, Rakettitiede has found a unique approach.

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“The IT consulting industry has gone through changes in recent years. Our biggest competitors are equally good, one is not better than the other. However, Rakettitiede wants to stand out as a brand with a unique approach to the field. For example, we believe in not taking things too seriously and infusing our marketing with a healthy dose of sarcasm and self-irony. This approach sets us apart from our competitors and has received positive feedback from potential talents. Seniority and excellence are an important aspect to our brand, but adding a little humor and lightheartedness can go a long way in making our brand more memorable”, says Jarno Laine, Founder and Senior Developer at Rakettitiede.

Rakettitiede recently made an overall brand renewal. Their new brand challenges typical tech company visuals that mystify coders, and presents its developers with bold candor, stripped of unnecessary noise. The new brand relies on playful communication, stripped-down aesthetics and strong photojournalistic photography to portray the daily work of Rocket Scientist without unnecessary polishing.

But now that you’ve found your unique approach to building your brand – what does it take to actually build a brand?

According to most marketing analytics, it usually requires a minimum of 15 touchpoints with your audience to create brand awareness.

This journey towards achieving brand recognition is key and is often achieved best through a continuous, steady stream of content. The creative use of varied content formats on chosen channels is imperative as well to ensure you captivate the right people in the right moments.

“Marketing and brand development from strategizing to implementation are my responsibility, along with customer marketing and communication plans. My job description is quite extensive, and I work closely with our recruitment and sales teams. About a year ago, a decision was made that we need more resources for brand building – my own resources alone are not enough to reach the goals. What is more, we also needed in-depth knowledge of employer branding. For us, it was clear that recruitment ads alone are not enough. Especially when the target group is so wanted and difficult to reach”, says Elina Turunen, Marketing Commander at Rakettitiede.

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Partnering with an employer branding agency could offer many benefits. Working with an experienced partner could allow companies like Rakettitiede to take advantage of the agency's expertise in creating and implementing employer branding content – as well as the additional helping hands.

“Now, we have partnered up with TalentBee in employer branding, and with Ellun Kanat, a communication agency on the customer marketing side, to deliver seamless results,” Elina says.

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Concerns and criteria when choosing an employer branding partner

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When choosing a partner for employer branding, Rakettitiede had specific criteria they wanted to meet. Elina focused especially on competency and communication with the agency. In fact, active communication was a crucial aspect when establishing a partnership between Rakettitiede and TalentBee.

“Especially, our tech recruiter Tessi Reispakka is super happy about the flowing and open communication between our and TalentBee’s teams. We are contacted often by Nea, and kept informed. That's really good, we appreciate it”, Elina smiles.

Rakettitiede contacted TalentBee during fall 2022 and we started negotiating about a potential collaboration in EB.

“The buying process with TalentBee was really easy and smooth. It was possible to customize the service, we got an updated package according to our wishes. There is nothing negative to say. We are in the consulting industry ourselves, too, so we appreciate their customer-centric approach”, Elina says.

What was the overall value proposition that TalentBee offered for Rakettitiede?

"Is TalentBee's offering primarily visionary or hands-on content creation for us? I believe it's both. Elina can handle strategy execution very well, but we also want a partner to think about the clear path forward with us. Visibility and network growth are our expectations from employer branding – so we expect that our EB partner can help us create new ideas for these", Jarno says.

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"We had some concerns about TalentBee's specialization in SaaS companies, and whether they would consider us as an equally important customer as an IT consultancy. However, knowing Nea and Siiri already, we were not worried about the future of our partnership”, Elina says.

"When we decided to collaborate also in content creation, we had another concern. We have always managed everything in-house, so allowing someone else, for example, to write our blogs felt like giving away your own children”, Elina smiles.

“Nevertheless, it has been a good experience to provide feedback for TalentBee – it has been well received. As someone with a teaching background, I believe feedback should be given frequently to avoid it becoming overwhelming. We prefer transparent communication over the hamburger model for feedback and TalentBee seems to think about feedback similarly”, Elina describes.

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How does Rakettitiede build their employer brand on a weekly basis?

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Rakettitiede's success in differentiation from competitors and attracting top talent is evidence that employee branding is essential for companies operating in a competitive industry. What kind of weekly and monthly actions do they take to succeed?

Firstly, Rakettitiede’s weekly and monthly employer branding actions are based on an EB strategy that has clear objectives, goals, and KPIs that can measure success. It is also essential to have the employer brand attributes and communication themes in place.

The appropriate channels have been selected according to the target audience segmentation, and ongoing competitor analysis is vital to stay ahead of the game.

“I closely follow the competition field, especially from the point of view of communication. It's important to stay on top of what kind of communication our competitors are doing so that we can stand out”, says Tessi Reispakka, Growth Lead and a tech recruiter at Rakettitiede.

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A weekly content plan designed on top of this implements the strategy. Rakettitiede’s content plan includes bi-weekly posts on the blog and career site, weekly posts on the company page, co-founders' personal profiles, and Instagram (including Reels and Stories) to create visibility. A talent newsletter keeps potential candidates informed, and the career site with calls-to-action drives engagement.

It's also important to map out the employer brand touchpoints during the talent journey, such as outreach on LinkedIn, applicant and candidate communication, and involving existing employees – the senior consultants, in co-creating valuable content. This is what Rakettitiede and TalentBee’s teams are working on together each month.

By working with the right employer branding partner, you can successfully achieve your employer branding objectives and stay competitive in the long run.

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TalentBee runs these employer branding actions for Rakettitiede on a monthly basis:

• Designing topics and content themes, and turning them into a social media & career site content calendar once a month
• Analyzing marketing data from chosen channels and making recommendations based on that
• Creating two blog posts for Rakettitiede’s blog according to the content plan
• Monthly meeting to go through results, data, next steps and new ideas
• Weekly communication over Slack about the ongoing content creation processes

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TalentBee offers customizable service offerings such as content design and creation for employer branding>>

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