Magnet Awards: Creating an Employee Brand


We are among finalists!

Read more about the awards 

Last week it was announced that SprintIT has been chosen as one of the top Employer Brand creators by Magnet Awards!  (2 Mar 2023) We have the honor of being finalists in the same category as Mehiläinen and KPMG!

"The Magnet Awards is a non-profit project and the only and largest of its kind within Employer Branding in Finland. The Magnet Employer Branding Awards has been organized in Norway and Sweden for the past 8 years! The goal is to celebrate the best employer brand initiatives in Finland and build a strong knowledge-sharing community."

We at SprintIT got excited about the Magnet Awards after realising that they have a category "Creating an Employer Brand". That is what we started doing in the very beginning of 2022 inside the People team - creating our unique employer brand.  They were looking for those companies that have established an employer brand strategy with key focus areas, creating a clear employer value proposition (EVP) for their target talent segment, and have an actionable roadmap for EB activations in 2022.

Our People team rolled up their sleeves and produced our Sprinter story into a document - call it portfolio, if you will. And since we are all about transparency, here goes!

SprintIT is who we are , Odoo is what we do, we make ERP easy

How we created our Employer Brand

It all started because of growth. Our little software development company SprintIT grew from start-up to an adult business and from a group of IT-savvy friends to an actual work community. 

It is the classic story: in 2021 we were growing fast in the customer segments and needed to grow the team and scale the company fast. 

We needed to determine who we were. We wanted to develop and document our culture, and afterwards be able to say, “hey, we are like this, would you like to join us?”. 

Long story short, we had our first culture workshops in the fall of 2021 and started to have conversations about Employer Branding (EB) at the same time. 


Then it was the beginning of 2022, our culture work had been done, we had named ourselves Sprinters, talked about our character and tone of voice, hired a Marketing Coordinator, published an Instagram account, scheduled weekly EB meetings and started to plan like crazy. The goal: to recruit one new person every month in 2022 and make a steady foundation for the accelerating growth for the future years. 

Getting serious with OKRs

We defined our Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for employer branding as well.  

1) SprintIT EB work kicking in
 

To be more known and to attract applicants: e.g. by publishing IG content every week and other content (blog posts, stories and interviews, videos, photos) as much as possible, optimizing web pages and perfecting our tone of voice, having on-going paid social media campaigns.
 

Questions to determine if we succeeded with this OKR or not:

Is recruitment easier? Do we get more applicants? What's the quality; meaning what was the candidate experience like for our candidates but also did our managers get the right talents to approach us? How do the new-comers feel about us? Do we look and feel like we say we do on social media and the recruitment process? What do Sprinters think of our social media efforts? Does this enforce our culture? What do we learn from data? What should we concentrate on? Are we doing the right things and spending money and resources wisely?

One of the EB team’s most important and concrete tasks was to establish career pages. The spring of 2022 went to planning, and version 1.0 was published at the end of June: people.sprintit.fi. Since then we have created a lot of content, fixed many issues, developed visuals further, and naturally followed analytics. The most important part of the website is presenting the open roles, and this year we will follow the conversion percentage more religiously. We know we still have work to do to make our People page more known among candidates, but the basis is solid and we’re good to go with the next steps!

On Instagram, we succeeded with our goal: publishing new content every week. Not everything was shared to Facebook and LinkedIn, just the most suitable ones. We followed the growing figures and also collected spontaneous good feedback from our applicants, clients and acquaintances. 

We promoted our open roles on Meta and LinkedIn with about EUR 200 budget per channel per month. Not the biggest of sums but good enough for testing and some visibility. LinkedIn banners proved to be the best form of boost to attract visitors to our website. 

2) Internal self-pride increases

How to measure pride? Well, we wanted Sprinters to share our content and to promote us to their network (recruitment bonus as prize). The Sprinters that were naturally active on social media were eager to work with us. However, no recruitment bonuses were given as in no referenced hires were made, so that’s a new challenge for us in 2023. 

2022 Facts and results​

What did it all cost?

If we count all the efforts made during 2022 for Employer Branding and everything related, it was an almost EUR 100 000 a year at SprintIT, as we also renewed our entire Helsinki office to be a more comfortable place for all the current and future Sprinters. 

We formed a specific culture and events club named SPARK to share the culture and organize events. We did a photoshoot, we designed swags, created dashboards with external partners for website and social media metrics… the list is long.

Budget: close to 100 000 € (including recruitment marketing) 
Resources: 1,5 FTE + additional resources in-house

End-results:  Modernized 1x IT Office in Helsinki, 1x website created, 1x community group created, 659 applications (+103%), 16 hires, improved quality of candidates, 1 x active Instagram account.  

The team

In the active Employer Branding team there are three people: our People Lead in Finland, HR Manager in India and Marketing Coordinator in Finland (with 50 % input in EB). 

That is not all though - we also had the entire management team’s support for our goals and the Marketing Manager helped us a lot along the way. The SPARK team was many times leading the way and showing by example on how to promote culture and share content in the EB spirit, developers helped with the website. So this was definitely an in-house project, still is. We have had quite a few influencers and past experiences to help us along the way. And we do feel quite proud about the end result. 

Thanks are in order for quite many Sprinters! 

The year 2022 was a real learning curve and now, in the beginning of 2023, we are so much wiser with everything. However, we could not be prouder of all our achievements so far. 


Welcome to get to know us better!

#sprintitfinland #sprintitindia 
#wearepsrintit #erpmadeeasy

@ sprintitpeople