Case Unity
44% yearly growth in relevant* applications
Finders Seekers x Unity
Pauliina Artiola, Recruitment Manager EMEA Operate Solutions, AI and G&A, worked with Sofia Pohls, Finders Seekers CEO, and the rest of the Finders Seekers EB team to create a hands-on approach to improving Unity’s local employer brand. Working together over the course of a year, Unity and Finders Seekers created a solid employer branding strategy that would live on and continue to add value long into the future.
*relevant = candidates invited to the first round of interviews.
Results
44% yearly growth
in relevant applications coming through company marketing and referrals (attributed to Employer Branding activities).
3 meetups
Organized local events that helped boost Unity's local employer brand in Helsinki.
8 blog posts
People stories and employer accounts written in blog format helped lift the lid on life at Unity Helsinki
12-month EB collab
A one-year project helped Unity find the perfect internal EB balance
Meet Unity 👋
Unity Technologies is one of the most recognizable brands in gaming thanks to its world-renowned cross-platform game engine that allows game developers to monetize their games. Unity technology is the basis for most virtual reality and augmented reality experiences.
Baseline
Unity needed to connect with local talent to highlight the wide range of opportunities available at Unity Helsinki, with roles across the software spectrum within Unity’s monetization, ads, and operations ecosystem.
The goal: highlight Unity Helsinki as an employer with a diverse offering for local talent, and not just as a haven for game developers.
Pauliina Artiola, Recruitment Manager EMEA Operate Solutions, AI and G&A explained how the desire to engage in employer branding came from the engineers themselves at a time when Unity ‘s recruitment function was focusing on talent acquisition from abroad.
Unity was missing a bit of a trick when it came to owning the talent market in its own backyard, potentially missing out on great local talent despite the Unity story being so intimately tied up with Helsinki.
With a busy recruitment team focused on filling roles, any potential employer branding partner needed to be fast-moving, agile, unafraid to get stuck in, and come with proven experience working on local employer brands in global organizations. Enter Finders Seekers…
Pauliina Artiola
Recruitment Manager EMEA Operate Solutions, Unity Helsinki
"Communication with Finders Seekers has always been clear from day one.
We have never been left sitting around wondering what is happening next, and why.”
Solution
Working together over the course of a year, Unity and Finders Seekers created a solid employer branding strategy that would live on and continue to add value long into the future.
“Instead of spending a lot of time creating fancy presentations and sitting in meetings, we wanted to jump straight into the work itself and learn more as we go,” Pauliina summarizes.
Pauliina and her team worked with Sofia Pohls, Finders Seekers CEO, and the rest of the EB team to create a hands-on approach to improving Unity’s local employer brand:
An EB strategy that Unity could run in-house
A regionally sensitive localized EB strategy
Strategic content & tech meet-ups boosted by a digital channel strategy (including organic and paid marketing) to lift the lid on life at Unity
Internal training on Employer branding mindset and invoking employee advocacy.
It was essential that any employer branding work could easily be handed over to relevant internal stakeholders and team members so that Unity would be empowered to continue independently building up their EB baseline.
Strategy
EB independence
Creating an EB process Unity could continue to run independently.
Rapid & agile approach
EB work was iterative and delivered in a rapid and flexible way.
Content dissemination
To highlight people stories, blogs and career journeys were widely shared.
Integrated Ops & EB
Templates, processes, and ideas were integrated into the wider organization and operations.
Impact
Right off the bat the work with Finders Seekers was very hands-on and tangible:
“It felt great to walk away with a really clear idea of what we could do on a daily basis when it came to improving our employer brand. It was great to know that everything we were doing were things that we could continue to do in a sustainable way long into the future. We had a structured plan and a sensible place for us to focus – minus complicated strategies and unrealistic campaigns. We were able to take action right away.”
Using readily available platforms like blog posts, meetups, and focusing on LinkedIn as Unity’s main talent acquisition media, made things lean and simple to execute. The key to success was consistency and regularity, focusing the work on areas where impact and change was possible.
“One of the most important things here was a sense of mutual trust, making it easy for me to be empowered to make decisions” underlines Sofia Pohls when describing the Unity collaboration.
“Trust is how we operate at Unity: it’s embedded into everything that we do”, Pauliina agrees.
Improving visibility with key local talent segments was one of the collaboration’s core KPIs and that was achieved through a 44% yearly growth in relevant applications coming through company marketing and referrals (Employer Branding activities).
“And communication with Finders Seekers has always been clear. We have never been left sitting around wondering what is happening next, and why”, Pauliina adds.
Handovers, transparency, and a commitment to detailed documentation means that it is easy for Pauliina and her team to integrate EB tasks into their everyday and their future work.
Finders Seekers has also been essential in helping Pauliina engage with internal stakeholders by co-creating presentations as well as empowering employee advocacy and enabling employees to become employee ambassadors for Unity. It’s that internal impact that’s really made a difference and will help support a global roll-out of some of the initiatives piloted in Helsinki.
“A big strategic focus for us has been diversity, equity and inclusion, which has been very important in all our EB work. Unity is a leading company in this aspect and it’s something we’ve weaved into everything that we do, and it’s been really impactful”, highlights Sofia.
Pauliina adds: “everything that we did was sustainable: our employer branding activities are ones that we know we can continue to do long into the future”. This gives Pauliina and her team a sense of security and continuity.
What Unity thought about working with us?
For Pauliina, working with Finders Seekers was definitely a no-brainer, the obvious choice for an employer branding partner, especially with the added benefit of a considerable amount of tech talent market insights. The partnership has enabled Pauliina to take immediate actions with long-lasting effects, helping her create an employer branding strategy that’s sustainable with real impact.
At the same time, Pauliina explains that she has no desire “to take all the credit: it’s really been a joint effort with the entire Unity team pulling their weight. There’s been some great internal advocates and everyone who has been involved has been engaged and active, but it’s also great because Finders Seekers have helped us create a system that is realistic for people to contribute to”.
When looking at the future, Pauliina and Sofia have some ideas of what could happen next:
“At Unity we know three months in advance who we will be recruiting next, so we want to focus on relevant themes in preparation.We want to highlight some of our talented leaders to show people outside the talent that we already have, the teams and the business they are involved in, and what impact you could have if you joined.
I want to continue to deepen our EB work in terms of what we do with the recruitment team and stakeholders. It’s not about necessarily making things bigger, but about keeping on with what we are doing and always ensuring that sustainability, consistency, and sense of balance”.
Working with Finders Seekers means that Pauliina and her Unity recruiting team now have an employer branding strategy and framework they can continue to execute on long into the future.
