Behind the Brand: Helle

Welcome to Behind the Brand - a series that highlights our employees and the topics within talent acquisition and HR that they are passionate about. In this edition, Partner and Principal Delivery Lead, Helle talks about the biggest recruitment challenges (and how to solve them) after 12 years in the industry.

We’ve always felt that the people are really what makes Amby, Amby.

Which is why we wanted to create our Behind the Brand - a written series that highlights our employees and the topics within talent acquisition and HR that they are passionate about.

In this edition, we're talking to Helle, a Partner and Principal Delivery Lead at Amby. She has been with Amby since the company was four people small, back in 2016. Since she joined Amby, she has been working highly client-focused. In this piece, Helle sits back and reflects on some of the main things she learned from her 12 years in recruitment and HR.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? 

Well, I'm originally from Kragerø, a small city on the way down south in Norway, and I grew up wanting to be a writer. I'm actually quite introverted—some weird sort of extroverted introvert—so when people see my personality profile and know that I have worked more than 12 years with recruitment and HR (8 of these as a consultant), they're usually surprised.

That being said, I have always appreciated people and been highly inspired by what people can achieve, individually and together. To me, being more introverted only means that I appreciate connecting more one-to-one and in smaller groups. It also means that due to the nature of my work, I have to balance out communicating a LOT with different people all the time with some quiet time in nature and with close family or friends. Such grounding and more introspective activities enable me to thrive and perform at my best.

Education-wise, I have a bachelor's degree in Organizational Psychology from the University of Oslo and a Master's degree in Strategic HR from Copenhagen Business School. During my studies, I took every chance to go abroad and apply my studies in practice. This brought me to an exchange semester in Canada, and internships in Austria, and Belgium—all three experiences from which I learned a lot.

My first job after my studies was a very broad role in a small Norwegian startup named Resoptima, which has now been sold to Halliburton. Starting my career in an extensive role gave me a steep learning curve in a variety of areas that I have been very happy about ever since, as it helped me see organizations more holistically and from different perspectives from early on. That being said, I was quickly drawn to recruitment and the people experience part.

What drew you to recruitment?

First and foremost, I was drawn to recruitment due to its strategic importance to any company. Without the right people on board with the skillset and attitude needed to solve the must-win battles, any company would struggle to achieve its aspirations (or pay loads for consultants).

Secondly, as an HR Manager early in my career, I was approached by numerous recruiters who seemed highly unprofessional. The more I learned, the more I understood that this profession had a very shady reputation among candidates and hiring teams alike. I guess in some way, I wanted to jump in head first and contribute to changing this situation—do my part in getting recruitment back on the map as a profession worth appreciating.

"Without the right people on board with the skillset and attitude needed to solve the problem, any company would struggle to achieve its aspirations (or pay loads for consultants)"

To sum up, I've always been intrigued by how much people can achieve under the right circumstances and impressed with our collective potential to change the world for the better. As such, recruitment has always felt like the place where I can make a difference with real impact—helping businesses and talent connect to achieve great things together.

It's also a fantastic profession for anyone who is curious by nature and who likes to understand different topics. Because each role, company, and hiring team are different, there is always something to learn and a wide variety of challenges to tackle on an ongoing basis. Recruitment is not rocket science, but consistently doing it well is not easy.

What are the main hiring obstacles you've seen throughout your career? 

Every role hired for will have its own challenges to tackle and strengths to play, as hiring success is influenced by everything from the company's employer brand, the candidate market, the timing, your selection strategy, the ability to keep momentum, and much more.

That being said, the main (and most enduring) obstacles throughout my recruitment career have been candidate attraction and selection. When recruiting for tech-related domains specifically, these areas are as relevant today as they were when I entered recruitment 12 years ago.

With regards to candidate attraction, I still see companies struggling to attract enough relevant candidates for their roles through advertising and even when investing in active search. This is not surprising as the talent shortage in tech is still evident—worldwide, there are still many more roles to fill than there are candidates to fill them, and the shortage is expected to grow, MIT Technology Review, 2023, and ComputerWorld, 2024. I think this challenge is evident for many people in tech, from hiring managers to team members to candidates and talent acquisition professionals.

A not-so-obvious obstacle in recruitment is the challenge relating to candidate selection. I'm equally passionate about both. In addition to helping teams attract the candidates they need, I want to contribute to ensuring they are equipped to make the best possible hiring decisions and reduce the risk of mis-hiring. In tech, I find most people obsess over candidate attraction, but placing too little emphasis on the quality of your selection process is a considerable risk to take, as replacing someone has a significant cost - both in terms of person-hours and morale, Recruitment & Employment Confederation, 2017 and Ledernytt, 2024.

"The main (and most enduring) obstacles throughout my recruitment career have been candidate attraction and selection."

How can a company solve the first challenge - attracting enough of the right candidates?

The world of tech recruitment is industry-agnostic. Whether you're a grocery store chain or the next Space X, you'll likely need tech talent in your organization, which means there are quite a few roles considered 'hard-to-fill’ in today’s business landscape.

These are roles you post (and perhaps get a lot of applicants for) but don't get enough interest in, from candidates with the competence and experience you need. As mentioned, this is mainly because there are way more jobs than candidates in these domains. Thus, some roles will stand unfilled unless you spend dedicated time and energy ensuring they don't. It’s not uncommon to hear about clients of ours having struggled for 6 months, to even a year or more to attract the candidates they need for certain roles.

Since you cannot rely on active candidates applying for your role, you need to take matters into your own hands and be the proactive party. My main advice to reduce this obstacle over time is to invest in building a strong employer brand. To learn more about this area, I recommend listening to Episode 8 of ‘The Ramp’, with Kate Aunas from Statkraft on How to build a lasting Employer Brand

To be successful in candidate attraction in the short run, I recommend you do two main things:

• Set aside (enough) dedicated time
• Take a targeted approach

Let's start with the last one first.

Step 1: Start by taking a Targeted Approach

To convert candidates who already have an excellent job into an active dialogue with you, I would recommend starting off by being very mindful of identifying and contacting the candidates who are most likely to hold exactly the competence you need and contact them with a message that is highly personalized rather than generic. Candidates (as most people!) like to feel understood. When they see a strong connection between their background and the role you contact them for, you are on your way to achieving this. Therefore, identifying the relevant candidates to contact is the first step to ensure success with your efforts.

A good way to identify candidates to contact with a targeted approach is to share your role (well-defined and written out in a job ad) with your organization and ask for tangible tips from their network that you can reach out to. Warm connections (like networks) usually convert much better than cold ones. As long as your team knows what you are looking for, you should get a few tips using this approach.

However, your team or extended team's network is seldom enough to solve your hiring needs, and I would never count on it to be (as it will slow you down if it turns out not enough). I would supplement that initiative with active outreach from your end into targeted environments of particular relevance.

Let's say you need a backend developer to develop a product based on the Microsoft stack, with very high volumes of traffic and strict demands for uptime and security. If you recruit for a smaller company, I would map out startups and scale-up environments that develop products with these demands (for this specific example, typically found within fintech, health-tech, etc.), but governmental organizations also have great environments to try out. LinkedIn is a great place to map out these environments and the candidates you'd like to approach. However, I would also think through people your team has met (or heard speak) at events like NDC or meetups hosted by Microsoft Security Group, Azure User Group, or the like. It could be profiles noticed in Discord communities, on Reddit, or the like - caring about the topics relevant to the role at hand - again, don't be afraid to engage your team (or hiring team) in building a longlist of candidates to contact! All of these tactics will help you narrow down to people who most likely have a background that is relevant to you and interests that are highly aligned with what you have to offer. Hence, the relevance of your intro is likely high.

A targeted approach is focused on identifying the relevant individuals to contact and contacting them in a manner that resonates highly with their situation and what they care about. Again, going back to the appreciation for feeling understood.

An approach I've found helpful over the years to work with a targeted approach at some scale can be summarized as follows:

Firstly, try to understand the needs and elements differentiating this position from the candidate's current role - use this understanding actively in your messaging as early as possible. An example of 'needs at play' could be the need for stability and security when candidates observe market turbulence. If you are a startup contacting candidates from established environments during turbulent times, I will highlight tangible track records, established owners, or other relevant aspects in addressing the need for stability and security.

Secondly; showcase early why you are contacting them specifically about this role and what you would like to achieve together with them (ideally highlighting both company vision and concrete tech challenges to solve). Again, if the challenges to solve are exciting and highly aligned with candidate's competence and fields of interest, the candidate is likely to feel understood and your message will feel relevant.

Thirdly, be humble. Contacting candidates suggesting they change jobs can be perceived as intrusive and nosy. This is easy to forget, especially as a recruiter, because we always do it and typically perceive the situation very differently - as we offer an interesting opportunity. I find that by staying humble to the fact that this may not be interesting to the candidate at all at this point, I open up for many interesting dialogues - also those that may not be relevant right now but further down the line.

Lastly, for especially hard-to-fill roles, I usually add a link to a carefully crafted landing page with more information. This is also targeted, focusing on providing the information our candidate group will be happy to get early on (e.g., tech stack, team, ways of working, plan ahead, and more).

Step 2: Dedicate (enough) time

To succeed in hiring for your hard-to-fill role, you need to engage more than just a couple of candidates in dialogues with you. To achieve this, you must set aside time for outreach and candidate dialogue activities. With busy days filled with other work and/or interviews, the outreach activity quickly falls short. To fight this tendency, you must plan recruitment for your next period at work - for yourself and others joining in- to assess candidates or support in other ways.

If you are responsible for attracting candidates to your recruitment project, I would advise setting aside at least four to five hours, three to four days a week, for at least two to three weeks. This is to build the momentum you need with enough candidates at once. Sounds too much? You can always slow down if you see that you are swamped with responses! And remember that your efforts don't stop once you have the candidates you want to get to know in dialogue - this is where it starts. To keep up the momentum now, you will be pleased because you have planned recruitment into your work and set aside time with the people needed in the process going forward. In this way, you will be able to keep your pace and progress with the candidates while they are still interested and engaged. We do not want any bottlenecks to progress now.

In addition to setting aside time for outreach and initial dialogues, you need to set aside enough time to continuously follow up with all candidates you have in the process. This ensures a great candidate experience for everyone, regardless of how far they reach. Recruitment is one of the most important employer branding initiatives your company invests in, as an excellent candidate experiences travel fast by word of mouth (often alongside the bad ones!). And remember the ones who do not match what you are looking for at this time. My experience is that a thoughtful but specific (read, not generic) rejection means a lot to any candidate and makes you stand out as a great example to mention to others. My principle here is to make it more and more specific the further in the process a candidate has been.

How can the company solve the second challenge - Selecting the right candidate?

Once you have relevant candidates interested, the quality of your selection process is the next big thing to tackle. Why? Well, for one - making the wrong choice can be very expensive. According to the same article by REC, 2017, “a poor hire at mid-manager level with a salary of £42,000 can cost a business more than £132,000”, as it will require a period to realize the problem, a process to let this person go, a process to replace as well as onboard a new hire for the same role. A mis-hire is not always one in which you have not succeeded in hiring a person with the right skill set; it may as well be one where a great candidate does not thrive and ends up leaving your company prematurely - also an expensive situation to deal with, as the cost of being left without the competence you need for an extended period will greatly hinder achieving your goals and strain team morale. In summary, getting your hiring decisions right is vital to business success.

To solve this second challenge, I recommend you do two main things:

• Be brutally honest about the role and expectations
• Develop a selection strategy and tools to ensure the red thread

Step 1: Be brutally honest about the role and expectations

A lot can be said about building an EVP, an Employee Value Proposition. In short, this is the promise a company gives to its employees - about what they can expect when being part of the company in areas such as work-life balance, career development opportunities, personal growth, company values, culture, mission, and more. At its best, it helps both current and future employees understand if this is the right place for them. A solid EVP carefully aligns the value propositions with what the broad category of candidates want and need and what the business needs to succeed. So far so good, and I'm not against the EVP line of thinking. However, an EVP will only be able to cover some things.

Furthermore, different teams will differ in what they need and can offer. Thus, in a recruitment process, I believe in doing a lightweight value proposition analysis and being very honest with candidates about what a role in this team will mean in practice. Can they expect the same work-life balance as the rest of the company, or are there specific aspects of this team that set it apart? How about physical presence in the office - what is expected and why?

Especially for companies in which an EVP has been established, certain expectations are created due to it, and even more important is to address any differences from the EVP in the selection process. This aligns expectations and eliminates the chance of unpleasant surprises for the candidate after starting. It helps no one to paint a rosy picture during the process and tell the candidates what they want to hear. We need to show them the reality and focus on finding the ones looking for this type of reality or find it a reasonable tradeoff to access other values they will get at the same company.

To successfully align expectations, you can take different routes. One route I would take with companies having a clear EVP is covering each aspect of the EVP with my hiring team when starting a process—understanding if the value proposition is valid for this department or team or if we have to adjust expectations during the process.

Another route I always take is using my knowledge about the specific candidate group at hand and what they usually value to map out how the company and team can deliver on these elements.

Thirdly, it is at the heart of any recruitment process—caring deeply about the specific candidate at hand and what matters to them in their life. How does this opportunity align with these needs? If I'm unsure as a recruiter, we'll figure it out during the process. Sometimes, we see perfect alignment. Other times, there's a clear misalignment. Both are valuable realizations.

Step 2: Create a selection strategy and tools that ensure a red thread

A selection strategy is a planned and systematic approach to choosing the most suitable candidates for job positions within an organization. It involves a series of steps and methods designed to assess applicants' qualifications, skills, and fit with the organization's needs and culture. This sounds straightforward enough, and often today, we have processes that utilize different methods, such as performing job analyses, semi-structured interviews, work sample tests, psychometric tests, and so on. Combining different methods is great and, according to research, adds validity to predicting job performance, ref. Schmidt & Hunter, 1998 and Sackett et al., 2021.

However, what I see in practice is often that different people are involved in different parts of the process. Without someone to orchestrate everything, we run the risk of designing a process that overlaps more than supplements. A highly overlapping process is inefficient and runs the risk of assessing certain elements very well, but others very poorly. The times in my career where I feel like I have failed the worst are when my hiring team, at the end of a process, don't feel like they know enough about an important competency area. I see it as my job as a recruiter to design a process that ensures we have measured the most relevant aspects when we get to the end of it with the least amount of time demanded by all parties.

So, what have I learned, and how would I recommend you develop a selection strategy and utilize it in practice? Here are the elements I find most important:

1. The job analysis: Take the outset in a structured job analysis where you map out elements like belonging in the org, EVP in this part of the org, the main purpose of the role, the main responsibilities of the role, the skills needed to successfully own and perform the said responsibilities, the personal competences relevant to performing in the role, day to day practicalities like travel days, salary range ++. The time you invest here will help you build clear communication to attract and select candidates, so please be sure you invest your time and energy wisely here. Do as much research as you can prior to meeting the hiring team so that you meet them well-prepared and can validate your hypotheses rather than starting from scratch.
2. Extract the main criteria: After a job analysis, I recommend extracting the main criteria we need to assess candidates on during the process to form the foundation of your selection strategy. Some of these criteria will be related to formalities, like assessing that the candidate's salary expectations align with what we can offer and that education is in order (if required). Other criteria will be related to skills needed in the role, like the candidate's ability to solve specific technical challenges like scalability utilizing cloud technologies, writing well-organized and easy-to-read code, etc. Others are more connected to personal competencies needed to succeed in the role, such as collaboration, which is found through research to correlate with personal aspects such as extraversion and others. We also have important criteria relating to motivation, such as motivation for a very hands-on role, motivation for a very broad role with a lot of traveling, depending on what you have to offer.
3. Map out when in the process we will assess what: To ensure we design for an effective process, where we measure what we need to with as little overlap as possible and as few steps as possible, this is an important step that I find to be overlooked quite often. When I map this out, I design with the potential dealbreakers being assessed early on, such as salary expectations, traveling days, presence in the office, and motivational factors. This is because it is irrelevant if the candidate has the competence we need if their salary expectations are way higher than what we can offer, if their life situation is incompatible with a lot of physical presence in the office, or the like. At the screening stage, I also start assessing technical skills (on a superficial level) to ensure that candidates being recommended for further processing seem to have the skill set required for the role. The most overlapping stages of the process are the screening with me as a recruiter and the 1st interview with the hiring team. However, in the first interview - with a well-formulated selection strategy, we do not spend time on formalities unless there are uncertainties or further clarifications needed for a candidate. We spend our time more on providing further information about the role, managing expectations, answering candidate questions, and assessing (more in-depth) the main criteria of relevance to decide if we are to move further in the process. In the later stages of the process, a deep dive into the technical skillset is done, often followed by a personality deep dive. At each stage, uncertainties from the hiring team and the candidate are noted so that we can discuss that in the next session.
4. Design tools to ensure the red thread: The red thread is our selection strategy, and tools are elements such as interview guides, case assignments, personality interviews, scoring guides, scoreboxes, and more. When you have your criteria clearly defined and your plan for when you are going to be measuring each criterion, your job of designing the tools mentioned above becomes a lot easier, and the tools become more focused as it is very clear what they should focus on measuring. An interview guide designed to measure elements like code quality and scalability competence should have questions designed to grasp exactly this. As recruiters, we will never be able to technically assess someone, but in my opinion, we should be able to work together with the hiring team to ensure we develop tools that measure what we need to measure. A great interview tool is, in my opinion, one where the hiring team is allowed some freedom for informal conversations, not too ambitious in what the team should be able to measure, easy to take notes in from the interview, and easy to assess candidates on the criteria of relevance after the interview. I find the interview kits that can be built in TeamTailor to be fantastic examples of how this can be done in a user-friendly manner.
5. Evaluate candidates based on the criteria you have been measuring: As human beings, we have a lot of mental biases. Checking your notes from interview tools is a method of scoring that helps you stay objective, focus on the facts at hand, and fight potential unconscious biases you have when you evaluate candidates. Scoring guides are other methods to ensure interviewers are aligned on what we demand of a candidate's response to give out a very high rating when evaluating criteria. This is particularly valuable when new assessors/interviewers are added to a recruitment process.

Any final thoughts?

The topics of candidate attraction and selection are broad, and each has many areas that would require a deep dive to fully explain and understand. Even after 12 years in the field of recruitment, I still actively work to advance my understanding in these areas all the time. Thus, this is not the perfect guide for getting these things right, but I hope it can serve as a starting point to deep-dive-further into more specific areas of importance to ensure hiring success.

Helle's Picks

If you want further readings, here are a few resources that I think are a great place to start!

• MIT Technology Review Insights in Partnership with HCL Tech, 2023 - New approaches to the tech talent shortage
• Computer world, 2024 - Within two years, 90% of organizations will suffer a critical tech skills shortage
• Recruitment & Employment Confederation, 2017 - Hiring Mistakes Are Costing UK Businesses Billions Each Year
• Ledernytt, 2024 - Hva er feilansettelser?
• The Ramp - an Amby Podcast, 2024 - E08: With Kate Aunaas Ingram, VP Global Attraction & Mobility at Statkraft. How to build a lasting Employer Brand.
• Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2021). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection: Addressing systematic overcorrection for restriction of range. Journal of Applied Psychology, No Pagination Specified-No Pagination Specified. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000994
• Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 262–274.