Case Study: Scaling Tech Recruitment with SOK

SOK’s IT and Digital Development units are software development hubs inside the retail and service sector giant S Group. SOK’s software development professionals develop and maintain online stores, mobile applications and other digital services for more than four million S-Etukortti holders, and also develop S Group’s core systems, based on which the S Group’s 14 billion retail sales business run.

SOK and Talented, a Witted company, have a long and successful history of cooperation and a shared vision of how recruitment should be done in demanding IT market. Therefore, when SOK decided to scale its tech recruitment activities, they were confident in Talented’s ability to help them in tackling the challenge right away.

Shared Values and Trust as the Driving Forces of a Successful Partnership

Talented’s Growth Consultant, Saima-Maija Rostedt, joined SOK’s recruitment team in January 2023 to assist with the high volume of recruitment needs.

To ensure that the retail group continues to hire the top digital experts and maintains a swift pace of development for their popular services, SOK carried out a large digital recruitment campaign in the fall of 2023. To hit their ambitious hiring goals, SOK had another Talented Growth Consultant, Kreetta Luoma, to help fill the multiple open positions.

Growth Consultant’s Role at SOK

Talented’s Consultants focused on coordinating the whole recruitment process for specific roles, including role definitions with hiring managers, ATS management, sourcing, screening calls, and booking
interviews. Together with SOK, Growth Consultants were also part of:

• Enhancing recruitment and candidate experience related processes
• Supporting hiring managers and collaborating on talent acquisition related topics
• Implementing an open application process to enable candidates to express their interest
• Building foundations for a talent pool process for future hiring needs

“100 New Digital Talents” Recruitment Campaign

The key components of a successful high-volume recruitment campaign:

• Effective two month schedule with a clear goal and realistic milestones
• Good candidate experience thanks to consistent communication
• Application screening started soon after the campaign and open roles were published
• Seamless teamwork and feedback between recruiters and hiring managers

The campaign exceeded SOK’s expectations and the target goal of new hires was reached.

“We have been extremely happy with our collaboration with Talented. I truly appreciate the shared trust and vision regarding tech recruitments and candidate experience at SOK.

 

Working with Talented’s Growth Consultants has been very beneficial. Not only have we been able to scale our operations quickly, but we’ve also enhanced our processes and improved our team’s ways of working.

 

Talented has provided us with excellent cultural fits and valuable additions to our tech recruitment team. The level of consultant and client matching has been top-notch.”

 

– Anna Ruokamo, IT Talent Acquisition Specialist, SOK