The company
Needo is a Swedish recruitment and staffing partner built around headhunting and proactive talent acquisition. They recruit across Commercial, Marketing, Tech, IT and Engineering, and run four business lines: Needo Talent, Needo Executive, Needo Interim and Needo On-site. 29 people work from offices in Stockholm and Gothenburg.
Needo does not wait for applications. Almost every assignment is headhunted, so a shortlist is only as good as the number of right people the team can reach and actually speak to. In Gothenburg, Peter Karnstedt leads the team as Team Manager and Sr Recruitment Consultant. Sandra Roséus, Senior Search Associate, and Felicia Alves, Search Associate, run the searching. It is not a side task for them. It is the job.
The problem
Sourcing was where the hours went. The team searched in LinkedIn, then wrote to candidates one by one. On a role with any volume, that filled most of a morning before a single conversation had happened. And with no shared view, recruiters had to check candidate by candidate whether someone was already in a process elsewhere in the company.
“Before, you searched in LinkedIn and then sent out manually to each person. So it took almost half a day, depending on how many people you were going to contact.”
Sandra Roséus, Senior Search Associate
“We headhunt on every assignment and can never rely on applications. We usually can’t afford to miss a single candidate.”
Nils Randerz, Team Manager and Executive Search Consultant
For an agency that headhunts, that is the expensive part. Every hour spent addressing messages is an hour not spent on the phone with a candidate.
The solution
Needo wanted the search and the outreach in one place, and they wanted recruiters to stop working in silos. Two things decided it: outreach that goes out automatically, and outreach that can go out in a colleague’s name, so recruiters support each other’s roles instead of each working alone.
“I would say efficiency. Both in the search but above all when it comes to the outreach itself. Partly that you do not have to do it manually, but also that you can send out from your colleagues that you work with.”
The outreach is still the recruiter’s own. They write the message and decide who gets it. What has gone is the part where the same message is addressed and sent forty times by hand. With the Ponty integration in place, recruiters can also see straight away whether a candidate is already in a process, or has already had a phone screen, without opening records one at a time.
The biggest change is where the hours go. The work that used to fill half a morning now runs in the background, and the time comes back as candidate conversations.
“If we were around 20 to 25 calls before, we often push 30 to 35 now. That gives greater value for us in the selection, and for the client in the end.”
Peter Karnstedt
Changing how a team sources is harder than changing the tool. Needo had used LinkedIn Recruiter for years, and the new way of working did not land with everyone at the same speed. Two things carried it. Sandra and Felicia search full time, so they learned the tool first and became the person a colleague asks when they get stuck. And TalentRiver stayed close, with a shared chat channel and fast answers through onboarding and the move to Ponty.
“It comes down to getting ambassadors. I think that has been the key here. These two have been internal superusers.”
A year in, nobody wants the old routine back. The search and the writing take less of the day, and the team has more of the part that actually decides a placement: time with candidates.
“In the beginning you had a habit of LinkedIn, you had your routines in it. But you do not miss it any more.”
