It is no secret that great employees make a great company. They create all the value for your customers and without them, your company would fail. Clearly, attracting talented employees and building the best team possible is one of the most important goals for your business.
Imagine if your employees never left. That is the current reality for Buutti - out of a team of 60, not a single person with a permanent contract has left the company since it was founded in 2017. Impressive!
We have asked Matilda Mustakallio, the Talent Acquisition Lead, and Sonja Mehtälä, People Operations Specialist at Buutti, what lies behind their amazing success when it comes to attracting and keeping the best employees.
So far none of our employees who work full time with permanent employment contracts have left our company. Honestly, I think that the reason is that we are still a young company and most of our employees have worked in Buutti for less than three years.
For millennials, it is quite common to change employees after a few years, so I assume that after a few years some of our employees will leave us. And that is only the natural circle of work life.
What we have learned is that the most common reason why software consultants are changing between companies is that they are not satisfied with their current customer project (for example they have familiarized themselves with the project and it is not offering them anything new), or they are not satisfied with their current salary.
In Buutti we focus on the personal development of employees. And we continuously discuss how our employees want to increase their knowledge and support their personal career paths.
About the salary; we have an open salary chart so if the employee is unhappy about his or her current paycheck, we can openly discuss the reasons behind the salary and if there is something that we could do in terms of offering a raise.
It is challenging to sum up a regular day because our days change a lot. For our recruitment team, our days are filled with communication with potential candidates, sourcing, interviews, meetings, and everything related to recruitment.
We are definitely focusing on flexibility and a friendly environment instead of rules and deadlines. Of course, there are those too, but our work is not too defined by them. Our work is really flexible, we can, for example, choose when and where we want to work. At Buutti we believe an employee knows where he or she can get the work done. Of course, there are some exceptions, especially on the developing side, if our developer is working with top-secret software. But mostly we want to offer our employees the choice whether to work at the office or remote.
Working at Buutti is fun and rewarding to my mind. I believe our retention rate tells that too. We want to maintain a friendly environment and our organizational structure is really flat. We have developers on the management team and the board: the company is managed from the developers' point of view and the same point of view is strongly emphasized in all decisions. Fun and humor are also part of our company culture. We have weekly quizzes about different topics, remote board game events, summer and Christmas parties, et cetera. Last but not least we have our own magazine which comes out every Friday. Ilta-Buutti is our pride and joy.
There are specific aspects we put extra attention to when hiring new employees. High technical skills are something that we find very important; we want our developers to value good technical solutions over quick fixes. Our developers are also very motivated and passionate about software development. When looking for new employees, we look for people who share this passion with us.
In addition to this, we put a lot of focus on continuous improvement. Besides being a consulting company, we also offer software training and support our employees in developing their skills. Everyone can use their working time for studying and developing their competencies. All our developers also have their own hobby projects, which we highly encourage.
To sum up, we are not too picky about applicants’ formal education, mother tongue, or even work history. Our recruitment process focuses on measuring their real technical skills and passion for programming.
Our recruitment strategy is to be as proactive and attractive as possible. IT recruitments require a curious and development-oriented mindset for our recruiters and sometimes we need to be fast, especially if there are active job seekers in question. Excellent candidate experience is also an important part of our recruitment strategy. We want to ensure clear communication for all candidates; good communication is the key to a great employer brand.
We are customer-oriented and we want to find great developers for our clients. Searching for developers can often be tricky - all recruiters working in the IT field know that. That’s why we use in-house consultancies, such as Cerecaptio. Cerecaptio supports us with our recruitments and increases our recruitment resources. Sourcing through different channels takes time and having an in-house consultancy has helped us to find new talents to join our team.
How do you feel about the collaboration between Buutti and Cerecaptio? What value has it brought to your company?
We were extremely satisfied with the collaboration with Cerecaptio. Communication with Cerecaptio was smooth and our expectations have been fulfilled. Cerecaptio created longlists which we then contacted by ourselves. During our busy spring, it was nice to have more sourcing resources. The candidate list Cerecaptio created was high quality and most of the candidates matched our requirements.
During the sourcing, we gave some suggestions about the profiles and Cerecaptio responded to those really well. Overall the collaboration was great and we may continue it in the future if we need more recruiting resources. We would definitely recommend Cerecaptio as an in-house consultancy partner.
Lastly, what would be your advice for companies that are struggling with employee retention?
Our advice would be to focus on your company’s strengths but also acknowledge and improve its weaknesses. When it comes to recruitment and retention, it is good to be proactive and always try to figure out new ways of finding talents and developing company culture. The IT field develops all the time and your company must keep up with all the changes. The “People first” approach helps us with retention. Focus on not forgetting the humor and on maintaining company culture. Make your company a workplace that employees never want to leave. You can do that by offering interesting possibilities and being a safe and encouraging employer.
Buutti’s example shows us there is a lot to consider when it comes to attracting and keeping the best talents. Instead of trying to fill in vacant positions as they appear, you can focus on looking for ambitious people that would bring value to your company. At Cerecaptio, we understand that the recruitment process is not always straightforward. Therefore, we offer in-house consultancy services to help companies find the greatest minds continuously.
Having an in-house consultancy will ensure that someone else takes charge of the most time-consuming part of the process and lets you focus on the relevant parts only; find the best match. A stable stream of suitable candidate profiles will guarantee that you are always one step ahead of everyone else. By not missing any talented candidates open to new opportunities, you can build the best team that will be prepared to tackle the next challenge.
As an in-house consultancy, we at Cerecaptio make sure to understand your company’s needs and align with your values in the long run. We provide flexibility, expertise, and a wide network of both Scandinavian and international talent - make sure not to miss out!
We help ambitious companies scale to their full potential by offering consultancy and talent services, built with competence in mind.
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