From expert to entrepreneur: My insights from building our employer branding business & team

Before founding TalentBee, I spent over five years as an employer branding consultant, working with around 80 companies on both short-term projects and ongoing client relationships.?

Even back then, I dreamed of growing into a team leader role because I have a natural knack for mentoring and a service-oriented approach to leadership. Helping others succeed has always been important to me; it's one of the main reasons I became a consultant in the first place.

During my consulting days, I also gained valuable sales experience, handling not just my own projects but also selling more extensive services. I felt prepared to take on the dual challenges of team leadership and entrepreneurship, knowing full well that it would be a different journey with much larger shoes to fill.?

This is where I took the leap and became a Co-Founder at TalentBee in 2022!

Transitioning from individual focus to team leadership: What I quickly realized when it was no longer just about me

At TalentBee, we got our employer branding business off the ground quickly, and Nea Raaska was the first consultant to join my team. From the very beginning, we secured ongoing monthly contracts with several clients that remain with us today.?

Nea can attest to the challenges we faced during those early days. As a new team leader navigating a fledgling business, I was acutely aware of the need to balance supporting Nea’s professional growth with maintaining high standards for our clients. Initially, this led to a bit of micromanagement on my part – I wanted to ensure everything related to client work was top-notch.

I see this same mentality in many of our young founder clients who are entrepreneurs for the first time, building their ventures from the ground up. However, it didn’t take long for me to realize, as they must too, that you must fully trust your team.?

Your business is only as strong as your team. You are part of this team, and your role as a leader is to facilitate their ability to make strong decisions, achieve impressive results, and drive success independently. If you try to oversee every detail and do everything yourself, you'll quickly become a bottleneck to your company's growth.

Key team metrics: numbers we track monthly, and how our metrics have evolved over the past year

From the very start, customer satisfaction has been a crucial metric for my team's success. TalentBee's employer branding clients have exceptionally high levels of satisfaction. And customer satisfaction leads to high customer retention, that is of course a key metric in our business. So far, not a single EB client has terminated their continuous relationship with us.?

A key reason for our high customer satisfaction is our focus on creating customer value. What clients perceive as valuable evolves as their companies grow. Companies investing in employer branding expect value in areas that directly impact their business. Key metrics here include, for example, time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, and employee retention. Improving employee retention significantly reduces recruiting costs and enhances employee lifetime value in growing companies.

Read how Nea worked as our client Fiksuruoka’s Interim EB Lead and achieved significant cost savings in headhunting through EB efforts>>?

On a team level, I naturally track billing per consultant. In a service business, this is the foundation of everything. Nea and I achieved our billing target in early 2024, making our team's efforts finally truly profitable. Several factors contributed to reaching this goal:?

• refining our team's workflows and processes to perfection (and of course continually revisiting these),?
• optimizing the number of clients per consultant to make it sustainable,?
• adjusting our initial pricing to the right level, and?
• continually ensuring the continuity of client relationships.?

Retaining clients successfully: How has my team excelled in maintaining strong client relationships?

I believe the answer to this question is simple. We frequently request feedback from our clients and have focused on building an exceptionally customer-centric culture at TalentBee. This includes a strong emphasis on giving and receiving feedback, both internally and externally.?

Our consultants continuously ask clients for feedback, particularly to ensure that they are receiving the value they expect from our services. We simply ask, “Have you received the value you are expecting from us in this collaboration?” This open line of communication means churn never comes as a surprise – it doesn’t happen when these conversations remain ongoing.

Internally, we practice giving feedback to each other often, training, improving through practice, and refining our processes and services to meet our clients' needs directly. This approach has shaped our employer branding offering, which has undergone significant modifications from our early days in 2022 to the present. It's essential to stay aware of the problems we are solving in a changing market. What matters is not building an immutable and perfect service offering but rather falling in love with the problem, not the solution.

We've also been praised for our ability to pivot quickly in collaboration with our startup clients. If recruitment needs change on the talent acquisition side, we can shift our focus to long-term team growth-oriented employer branding, delivering substantial business benefits in recruitment.?

Read how we pivoted our partnership with Noice>>

Scalable EB practices: What does TalentBee's approach to scalable employer branding look like?

At TalentBee, we are committed to building a scalable business. From the very beginning, we have designed our processes with the needs of a growing company in mind. Our goal is significant growth, so we need to establish processes for employer branding that will endure as our team expands to 10-15 members.

The necessity for scalable processes also stems from the simple fact that our clients are growing businesses, and we aim to be their strategic growth partners. We must build processes and practices that are robust and agile enough to evolve alongside our clients' growth. As an EB team, we always look one step ahead for our clients.?

However, essentially, we don't just create EB content or develop career pages with great processes; we help our clients' teams transform into teams that strategically do employer branding. This is where true scalability in employer branding comes from.

Nea and I often discuss that our role isn't merely to lead EB within our clients' teams; we are leading change. How does a growing team become one that effectively implements EB??

This is a crucial focus in our collaborations with clients. It involves getting to know our clients' employees broadly, ensuring they understand what our employer branding initiatives entail. We engage with them, amplify their voices, seek their opinions, and provide a platform where they feel heard and valued as professionals.?

We report on results, showing the substantial outcomes their involvement has enabled. Strategic results that matter most to the team members include successfully recruiting new, top-tier colleagues who are not only motivated to join but are already inspired by the team they are about to enter! Simon Sinek’s “start with why” philosophy is central to making a client’s team one that embraces EB.?

As I mentioned earlier, you are only as strong as your team. This applies to EB as well: a scaling company's employer branding is only as robust and scalable as its people's understanding and motivation towards EB. That's why we focus on this with full intensity.

Growing the EB team: When do we hire additional talent, and how do we approach talent acquisition??

Our EB team is continually recruiting new talent, and we approach this process thoughtfully and with a long-term perspective. We receive and review open applications constantly. Just before my vacation, I scheduled several introductory calls with potential EB colleagues for August, when I return to work. Our pool of open applications currently includes several highly skilled candidates.

When looking for new EB specialists, I primarily seek individuals who are enthusiastic and ready to drive EB transformation within our clients' teams. This requires strong social skills and a leadership mindset.?

For example, Nea epitomizes the kind of talent we aim to bring on board: she acts as an Interim EB Lead, manages clients' EB processes, leads monthly EB growth sprints, produces content, and drives continuous EB growth. But most importantly, she guides clients forward with a steady hand.?

Our clients trust Nea as an EB consultant because she:?

• communicates consistently and keeps everyone informed,?
• inspires employee participation,?
• explains the reasoning behind every EB action,?
• pitches new ideas to key stakeholders,?
• justifies the importance of the work with business metrics, and?
• has a forward-looking vision aligned with the client’s business trajectory. In this context, EB plays a crucial role, impacting company culture, employer branding, recruitment success, and employee retention directly.

We continuously look for professionals eager to work as EB consultants at TalentBee. Hiring from our well-curated talent pool, we invest time in building relationships with potential hires well before they join us. The current market challenges have slightly delayed us in meeting our hiring targets for TalentBee's growth, but we are on track to expand our EB team in 2024.

I also stay attuned to changes in the EB landscape. Recently, I hired Riya Sharma as our EB intern, who immediately started enhancing our capabilities by producing short videos. In modern marketing and EB, the significance of short videos continues to grow, which is why we wanted to bolster our team with this in-house expertise. Moving forward, staying updated with industry changes and acquiring relevant skills will remain a priority for me.

Are you interested in joining our EB team someday? Check out our career page for application instructions and become part of our journey. If we see you as a potential fit for us, I'll invite you for a meeting. Let's start getting to know each other>>

Are you responsible for your company’s EB & want to get fresh ideas? Book a session with me (I’m on a vacation during July, but after that, and let’s create some buzz!) Book a session to create fresh EB ideas for you>>