Five from Finland
HR and staff training
Finns are leading the way with innovative tools for staff recruitment and retention.
What’s the use of a great business idea, if you don’t have the people on board to help make it a reality? These Finnish solutions tackle various aspects of staffing with gusto.
Decades of research inform this company’s HR testing and assessment questionnaire WOPI, which measures the motives, thinking and attitude drivers of competence. With it, users are able to help reskill a workforce challenged by new competency requirements caused by digitalisation.
“We focus on the less-changing competencies driven by age-old psychological drivers,” CEO Petteri Niitamotold us in 2016. “I could go back to the Stone Age, administer WOPI and find the same type of people we find today. There would be hunters driven by competition, leaders driven by leadership motives and shamans driven by intuitive thinking.”
Seeking your dream job is, well, the dream of many. But how many times has your enthusiasm for an open position been met with a chasm of silence? Have no fear, for clear and fully personalised feedback is here. This company provides recruiting tools for internationalising businesses and focuses on developing greater recruitment communications. A significant funding round has also boosted its fortunes.
“Recruiting is full of crazy customs and takes hours of your time,” stated CTO Joni Latvala. “It’s pretty inefficient and we want to fix that.”
Improving companies’ productivity levels is a cinch for VibeCatch, by pointing out the wellbeing and strengths of employees to management and HR teams. This meets the need for more frequent employee feedback and engagement data.
“With this knowledge, business leaders now have a deeper understanding of sentiment across their workforce, enabling them to take appropriate action to solve specific issues before they get bigger and more damaging to the business as a whole,” said CEO and co-founder Juha Huttunen.
This company specialises in facilitating pre-recorded video interviews, with the goal of enabling recruiters to see the real person behind each application.
“I haven’t heard of anyone being brilliant on the video and then really nervous face-to-face,” former CEO Ari Beilinson told us when the company was still known as Recruitby.net. “Videos tend to give a relatively accurate image. Many candidates like making the videos, because they offer a better opportunity for presenting yourself than a written cover letter.”
It’s not all about saving time by engaging potential staff members with video interviews, though. RecRight’s applicant tracking system offers a tool for publishing jobs, receiving applications and collaborating with colleagues.
Oppia.fi
Years ago, Petri Väyrynen and his consulting company Wakaru created an ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, an automated process for handling all possible aspects of organising a training event. Around the same time, he noticed that even big corporations were beginning to look for small and agile training providers to update staff on changing technology.
“We figured it’d make sense to bring both big and small training houses together in a cost-effective way,” he stated earlier this year.
Combining the logic of an online store and Wakaru’s initial ERP, Oppia.fi was launched to serve as a platform and technology provider for companies that already operate in the field of training.
“Oppia.fi is a business case that proves that the platform works,” he said.