The IT service company Atea, which operates in the Nordic and Baltic countries, recruits new talent through recruitment training programmes whenever possible. The professionals who came to their cooperative companies for training through recruitment training programmes have mainly become permanently employed at these companies.
Surveying recruitment needs
Atea employs 650 people in Finland and around 100 new professionals are recruited each year. Recruitment is carried out in many different ways.
Riku Mustajoki works at Atea as Recruitment Manager. Riku is responsible for discussing recruitment needs with the managers of different teams and assessing which way is the best for finding a new employee. Recruitment training programmes make it easier to find new professionals, especially in data management and hybrid platform teams.
“Recruiting new talent through recruitment programmes is successful when the resources in the team enable mentoring the new team member. In addition, the content and schedule of Saranen’s recruitment training programme must suit our needs,” Riku says.
How to support recruitment training participants?
In Riku's opinion, the future talent coming through the recruitment training programme must be treated in a slightly different way than when recruiting established professionals. When established professionals are recruited to Atea, they are expected to work independently from the beginning.
“This expectation does not apply to professionals who have come to the company through recruitment training. We understand that it takes time for new professionals to grow into their roles, and this is supported by the training programme itself and the mentoring provided at the company. In other words, the start at Atea is stress-free, even though there are some expectations for people coming through recruitment training.”
What can a company expect from new professionals?
Riku Mustajoki thinks that, thanks to the long cooperation between the companies, people at Saranen already know what kinds of employees Atea wants and what types of persons are a good fit for the company. According to Riku, a lot of good people have come to the company through training programmes.
The most important criteria for future professionals coming through recruitment training are related to their motivation and their involvement in the topic. For Riku, it is extremely important that a professional selected for the company can prove their previous interested in the industry. People participating in the training programmes are expected to show initiative and, above all, interest in the industry – they need to be enthusiastic about contributing to it.
Why should a company recruit new talent through training programmes?
In Riku’s opinion, the major advantage of recruitment training is how smooth, risk-free and cost-effective it is.
Recruitment training is a form of labour market training and it is always carried out in cooperation with the local TE Services and ELY Centre. In Riku’s opinion, the bureaucracy associated with training programmes does not burden companies at all; the process runs smoothly. The smoothness is enhanced by the search for and pre-selection of applicants carried out by Saranen.
Riku Mustajoki recommends recruitment training programmes to companies and teams that have resources that can be allocated to the mentoring and onboarding of a new professional.
“Here at Atea, we have been so satisfied with the training that we are considering establishing a company-specific programme for our Joensuu unit,” Riku says.
