Quality over quantity

Alv decided to focus on its people strategy and talent brand. Leveraging its unique work and company culture, Alv created brand messaging designed to appeal to candidates and used LinkedIn to both reach potential applicants and recruit highly skilled individuals.

“IT is a hard recruitment market but that does not mean we must compromise on the quality of our hires,” explains Kristin Bjerke, Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder at Alv. “Our quality targets are more important than our growth. We don’t employ people that don’t fulfil all our requirements.”

Alv created a video series that documents life at the company. It describes a typical working week and addresses relevant and topical issues that the company believes will appeal to the type of candidates it wishes to attract.

The video series has been a major success. Whilst Alv shares the video content on YouTube and Facebook, it receives the most engagement on LinkedIn.

“We post the content every Tuesday,” Kristin adds. “It has been very successful and so have our advertisements on LinkedIn.”

She continues: “We are unique because we only operate in Norway, and we need IT consultants that are fluent in Norwegian. Our customers are big companies and organisations that operate in Norway so it’s important that our consultants understand our customers’ needs. When we post jobs on LinkedIn, we receive a lot of interest from IT professionals with an international approach. We use the filters on LinkedIn to find applicants that are fluent in Norwegian, and this helps us to find the digital talent that we really need.”

Finding motivated professionals that match Alv’s ethos

Alv stopped working with recruitment companies 12 months ago and now only works with LinkedIn to find the best IT talent and attract a wide variety of candidates from across the IT spectrum.

“We only want to work with people that want to work with us,” Kristin continues. “If we have to push people hard to consider us, then they are not the right people for the job.”

Candidates are screened. The right candidates must be technically competent, and Alv looks for people that want to develop their personal and professional skills. Applicants must be eager to learn. That’s because technology is developing so fast.

“You could be a good developer but if you don’t improve and get better, in two years’ time, you will have fallen behind, Kristin explains further. “We look for consultants that want to collaborate and understand that social interaction is important. When you are a developer, you don’t just visit a customer to implement a solution, you go to the customer to work with them and make what they need. Therefore, you need to be able to talk to and work with people.”

Primary source of new hires

Alv clearly defines its expectations and outlines what it requires from its hires. “We dare to voice our opinion,” adds Kristin. “We dare to put what we expect from people on our job advertisements. We have created customised job profiles and because of that we have attracted a broad spectrum of IT talent.”

Alv has used LinkedIn’s Talent Solutions full suite of products for three months. In this short period, ALV has grown its hires. In fact, 17 per cent of hires are via LinkedIn. This means that LinkedIn is Alv’s primary platform for recruitment, networking, and branding.

Kristin concludes: “IT is such a hard area to work in. LinkedIn has been a great platform and has given us access to high quality candidates. We are looking forward to working with LinkedIn even more closely and if we continue to build on our recent successes, I am sure that we will continue to grow and that we can evolve our talent strategy together.”