Päijät-Sote’s Employer Branding facelift yielded instant results

When the public welfare company Päijät-Sote wanted to grow their internal digital team after heavy outsourcing, they turned to Talented’s IT specific domain knowledge. The cooperation had two main focus points: helping Päijät-Sote to recruit the needed IT talent and to build foundations for the digital development unit’s employer brand.

Like everyone, Päijät-Sote wanted to recruit a handful of IT professionals. However, being a public operator causes a few characteristic challenges to recruitment: not everyone is into the Finnish language and on-site requirements, and the public sector is not necessarily the best known for their agility and modernity either. On the other hand, health tech is a trending domain. Despite the known challenges, Päijät-Sote was up for the task to develop their employer brand and recruitment to boost its growth.

Employer branding project engaged a large number of people

Due to two major functions, there were two Talented growth consultants involved in the process – the other took responsibility for recruitment, and the other for employer branding related activities.  Moreover, there were several internal teams from Päijät-Sote as well as other external operators involved in the project. Firstly the most important thing was to get everyone on the same page about limitations, desires, procedures, responsibilities and time table. After that it was time to get to work.

Improved candidate experience opened the door for inbound applications

In addition to helping Päijät-Sote with direct search to fill in roles such as Data Architect, Data Engineer, Software Architect, Infrastructure Architect, and Chief Information Security Officer, Talented growth consultant also put lots of effort in developing the recruitment practices and candidate experience. A new, minimalistic recruitment process was created and implemented immediately, and an increased amount of inbound applications started coming in on a weekly basis right after the new process was taken into use. In the public sector, minimizing bureaucracy isn’t something that’s done easily but Päijät-Sote fought through the obstacles and gained great results.

Building the fundamentals for digital development unit’s employer branding

The biggest push was to create brand new career pages for Päijät-Sote’s digital development team. The work was completed in just six weeks, beginning from mockups, layout and content planning to actually creating the content – both text and video – and building the website. There were a few technical, and public sector related limitations and a coincidental rebranding from PHHYKY to Päijät-Sote that needed to be considered in the process. Also accessibility played a big role on the content side.

The biggest change was simplifying the application process and enhancing candidate experience. Instead of arduous information searching and scrolling through multiple pages, potential employees can now find all information under the career page: what the digital team does, open positions and applying to those positions. You can see the end result here.

In order to build  Päijät-Sote’s employer image as a digital employer, an employer branding themed content plan was created for the digital development unit. Talented growth consultant created and published the content in agreed channels, and launched a marketing calendar for the comms team. The consultant also created visual layouts for brand aligned social media pictures.

Moreover, Talented growth consultant helped Päijät-Sote’s HR team to redefine the employer value proposition (EVP). The promises were then included in the content plan and communicated by the comms team. Last but not least, an employee ambassadorship got a wind in its sails.

Results

Päijät-Sote warmly welcomed the implemented changes, and brand new career pages, systematic content production, as well as the new recruitment process and enhanced candidate experience have yielded positive results.

• From 13 employer branding themed piece of content, nine were included in the top 10 most engaging content from the past 12 months (August 2020 – August 2021)
• As a sum of everything done in the project, Päijät-Sote has received a record amount of inbound job applications. During the project, several positions were filled by the organic candidates. Quality applications are a big money saver in every organization as you don’t have to search for suitable candidates.
• Five IT professionals were hired during the four-month-long cooperation.

You can see people praising Päijät-Sote’s new recruitment process on social media, and the employer branding content has remained an active topic on social media platforms. It’s evident that Päijät-Sote is now better equipped to succeed in the competition over IT professionals and to hit its growth targets!

In the future, every company will be a software company. To prosper in the digital future, winning the talent war is a paramount. That means succeeding across the entire employee lifecycle – attracting, recruiting and retaining the best IT professionals. Talented helps organizations to do just that through Talent Acquisition, Employer Branding and building winning Employee Experiences.