Expecting different results

Is it more important to work 37,5 hours a week than get the results you should regardless of the time used? It’s 2021, and we are still wondering if this is the case. Albert Einstein is widely credited with saying, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

So here I am wondering where should I even begin and believing that results are more important than hours? I put on Vivaldi’s Four Season and start drafting a mind map over what I’d need.

Go big or go home – set the goals.

I’m looking at the empty slide and shaking my head. Where do I even start? I took my phone and called a strategy wizard Jari Ikäheimonen, and asked for help. After some sparring, I was ready to pour my goals and changes on the slide. Thanks to a good guidance it was easier than I thought in the beginning. The one-slider was an excellent way to start.

Our aim is to build a new Digital tech center with multiple teams or squads, maybe even whole new tribes in Espoo. As a side product, we’d like to shake the insurance industry and make the whole industry a bit more appealing and sexy. We know this will not happen overnight, but our mentality is to go big or go home – meaning we’re not afraid to fail while trying to build new and innovative approaches.

So here’s the goal and then the reality. I’m not a recruiter, nor a seasoned Microsoft developer, and my aim is to have a unit filled with tech talents. You can feel the ingredients for a catastrophe here 😉

I can’t do this alone- finding the right partners

Building what we visioned is clearly not a one-woman show. It was evident that we needed fresh ideas and needed to partner up with professionals both inside and outside the company. We just needed to find the ones who share similar values and beliefs of our vision. Having partners doesn’t mean you don’t have understanding internally. Like in this case, it just means that we need a strong view to challenge us and some extra support to guide us.

Traditional sourcing and headhunting wasn’t an option, not because it’s classic, but because we felt we needed a deeper understanding and more robust backbone to our actions. We wanted to make sure we’d have the information and plans in place to have a comprehensive look over the situation and act on that. We selected Toptier as our partner, and I have to say I’m pleased and impressed how Hilla Lempiäinen has been guiding us towards our targets.

We started to build our recruitment strategy and plan. The ones who have done this can relate to the feeling of digging and seeking the documents and information which would be somewhere and should help you on the way.

In a European company, some things take a longer time due to broader impact. We also continued IT Employer branding efforts which had a strong start already.

Deside what should be done and start recruiting

Internally, we have started discussing the products, enablers and produc lines, which could be supported by Espoo, along with the cross-functional and Nordic-level initiatives that will be starting during autumn. This too won’t happen over night so some of the things we have decided and some are still on the table.

As with so many other companies, we also have started our recruiting efforts. The market is hot, and candidates are getting lucrative offers from multiple companies. Unfortunately, the situation is driving recruiters to be tempted to oversell what companies have. One of the things we agreed on was always giving the good, the bad, and the ugly of the situation and the role we’re offering.

Economists are predicting a massive wave of resignations in the coming months. In addition, up to 40% of employees at some companies consider career changes after working from home or living on unemployment supplement for a year. The reasons are varied — burnout, unwillingness to return to the office, opportunity to change while unemployment all factor into it. It remains to be seen how this will affect our work as well as the IT sector in general.

One thing we haven´t yet figured out is how to make the insurance industry sexy employer. I think, in order to do that we’d need help from all the companies working in insurance busienss in Finland.

How is it going?

Well, I’ve learned a lot about recruitment as well as employer branding. I have also managed to dig more into If as a company.

I could descripe the situation as a multivendor project: You’re calendar is fillid with meetings with different partners and stakeholdes and, timed tasks to make sure your initiative is moving fast enough towards right goal.

We have started to build our first teams. AND YES! You can call/ping/mail me if you think you’re a perfect fit for our team 🙂 We aim to have several teams in place by the end of this year, so it will be busy.