TalentLyft: “Marketing & Recruiting Have To Work Together To Win The War For Talent

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The War for Talent has evoked a higher awareness of employer branding in order to attract high-quality talent. We spoke to Kristina Martic, Head of Marketing at TalentLyft, about the future of RecTech and hiring strategies.

How would you describe TalentLyft in a few words?

In simple words, TalentLyft is a recruiting tool that helps companies find, attract and hire the best talent.

What inspired you to create the startup? How did it all start?

Following all the trends in the world of talent acquisition, we knew very early that major changes were coming. We also knew that, with all the changes in technology, advanced recruiting strategies would become a huge competitive advantage when hiring the most talented people.

In order to be able to attract these people, having innovative and productive talent acquisition strategy is a must. This is the best weapon you can have in the “War for Talent”. TalentLyft was created with the main goal to help companies implement new recruiting strategies in an easier and more efficient way. We have helped companies build their employer brands and value propositions, communicate them more effectively and streamline their overall hiring processes.

With an immense number of recruiting startups, the competition is fierce. What makes TalentLyft stand out from the crowd? What is the key differentiator?

TalentLyft is different from many existing tools in a way that it covers both, the pre- and the post-application process of recruiting. In other words, our platform covers the first 3 stages of a candidate’s journey (awareness, consideration, interest), while our ATS (application tracking system, Ed.) platform covers the last 3 stages (application, selection, hire). Often, recruiting tools offer only one of those solutions. While companies used to integrate various tools, they are now turning towards a single solution that solves all or most of their problems.

Are you using your services internally? How does that affect the viewpoints of the development team?

Yes, we are using our tool internally. Part of our development team is actually the team that came up with the idea, developed the software and founded the company. Me and another founder, who is also our CTO, knew from the beginning that customer feedback will be our best and most relevant source of information for software improvement. We still live by this rule in our journey to create a recruiting software that solves biggest recruiting challenges.

You don’t exclusively focus on recruiting but also marketing. How do the two go together and what are some of the more common pitfalls when it comes to employer branding?

Recruiting is becoming more and more like marketing. You may have already heard people say that candidates should be treated as customers. This is absolutely true – talented people have many options to choose from, and before they choose their next employer, they do their research. They read about a company’s culture, employer brand, interesting projects and employee value proposition.

If you don’t have a good employer branding strategy, and if you don’t have methods for communicating your employer brand, you will not be able to attract high-quality job applicants. This is why marketing and recruiting have started working together to implement strategies in which marketing methods are used for recruiting and hiring. This is an extremely interesting field, and it will soon become an inevitable part of every talent acquisition strategy.

What can you tell us about the users of TalentLyft? Who are they and what are they looking for?

Most of our users are HR professionals involved in various phases of talent acquisition. Some of the most common positions among our users include HR Specialists, Managers, Directors and Vice Presidents of Human Resources. In smaller companies and startups that don’t have HR departments, it is not uncommon to see that CEOs, COOs or even CTOs use TalentLyft.

Since recruiting is becoming very similar to marketing, and many companies have started using Recruitment Marketing strategies to hire, and we are extremely happy to see that more and more marketing departments and specialists trust our services. Marketing and HR departments have realized that they have to work together in order to build more effective talent acquisition strategies.

For startups, one of the most crucial factors is recruiting developers. What should they watch out for and how can they make sure to hire the best fit?

Developers are definitively the number one hard-to-fill role in any industry. While bigger companies have employer branding departments which only work on attracting talent, most smaller size companies don’t have this luxury. However, there are other ways of attracting and hiring these people.

Start by improving small things. For example, you can make your career site more attractive by communicating your startup culture, introducing your team members, adding employee testimonials and writing about cool projects you work on.

Referrals are another great way. Use your current employees’ networks to find the best people. Your employees know best who your ideal candidates or candidate personas are, and they are your best advocates!

Additionally, it’s a great tip to make your job descriptions perfectly clear, transparent and attractive. Remember that money doesn’t have to be the biggest motivator for young and ambitious people who are looking to keep improving and learning. Give your best to communicate your culture, so that you attract candidates who are the perfect fit for your company.

On your website, you mention that you don’t love rules in the work environment. Instead, what do you focus on?

We are all strong believers in innovation and the constant improvement of our software. Our main goal is to collect feedback from our users on a daily basis, think of ways for implementation, and create solutions for their biggest challenges. Planning and going by the rules is often not an option for us, but we always strive towards developing one of the best recruiting tools out there.

What’s next for TalentLyft?

Keep improving our product! We know, we have a great tool but there’s always room for improvement. In a few weeks, we are starting a new project with the main goal of building one of the most powerful sourcing tools in the world. As talent sourcing is becoming one of the most important recruiting strategies, we wanted to contribute more to making this task easier for recruiters and other HR professionals.

We are also adding more marketing options to our tool. Users will then be able to track their career site visits and conversion rates, create career sites themselves, create engaging email campaigns for candidates, use social media for recruiting, optimize application forms and improve the overall candidate experience.

As a Croatian startup, what do you wish for in improving the European startup ecosystem?

I would love to see fewer barriers to enter the market and start a business. I would like to see more support for small firms and startups. There are companies with great ideas, plans, great teams but they are unable to grow. In some countries, such as Croatia, finding capital or investors is very hard, and I hope this gets better in the near future. Overall, there are some projects organized to better the situation but I believe that there is still a lot to be improved.

What’s one piece of advice you can give to fellow founders for their startup?

Build great teams! This is something I truly believe in, and the only piece of advice I am 100% sure and confident about. I am not talking about a team with the best skills, education, and intelligence. I am talking about a team that works well together and strives toward the same goal.

If you are able to build great teams and keep it that way even when you become bigger, you have much higher chances of success. Building a great team is the biggest prerequisite for building a great business.

 

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