This fiscal year was a special one as we wanted to match the calendar year, and therefore extended our fiscal year to 18 months starting from July 2020 and ending in December 2021. And what a period it was! Coming from the darkest months of COVID’s business impact to the biggest growth phase the company has ever seen, we have definitely evolved and learnt
on the way.
We started the fiscal year very tired. It was the summer after the first COVID spring, and the previous months had been hard for sure. During spring 2020, our main priority had been to secure existing business and focus on keeping our people happy and engaged. We had burnt our financial runway, but didn’t need to do any layoffs.
Recruitment Business Slowed a Bit But Employer Branding Gained Ground
It was apparent that our recruitment side of business slowed down but we were glad to see employer branding gaining ground. Back then, many companies realised they needed to make an extra effort to keep and retain their employees and as the recruitment slowed down everywhere, inhouse teams had more time to invest in employer branding, too. This meant a good amount of inbound leads and new collaborations for us, and employer branding had started to gain ground and account for a bigger percentage of our revenue.
After a well-deserved holiday, we kicked off the autumn with good energy and ready to get back to our growth track. What we saw in spring 2020 was that both candidates were hesitant to consider new job opportunities, as well as companies were hesitant to hire.
Nevertheless, in the autumn, the recruitment pace almost doubled in many of our client organizations. For us, this meant that we were lucky to strengthen our own team with sales, employer branding and talent acquisition professionals.
Over 300 Applications to Talent Sources Positions
In autumn 2020 we also recruited a few Junior Talent Sourcers, aiming to have an even stronger team for the upcoming winter. One of our founding principles at FiSe has been to make talent acquisition professionals feel pride over their work, and to make young professionals excited about recruitment as a career. It is important for us to offer work opportunities also to people who are new to our industry. Our Talent Sourcer recruitment was extremely popular with over 200 applications and two great junior professionals selected! Additionally, we welcomed new Recruiters and Employer Branding Specialists to our team during the spring of 2021.
That is also when we officially formed our new leadership team which consists of Anni Helinen, Head of Talent Acquisition Services, Vivi Brooke, Head of Employer Branding Services, Lassi Lankinen, Head of Sales, Saku Ruus, Chief Growth Officer, Petra Erkkilä, Chief Operating Officer and Sofia Pohls, Chief Executive Officer.
After the summer, we made a strategic decision to divide our talent acquisition team in two. Joel Mustonen was selected to lead the direct search team and Ida Joenpolvi to lead the in-house talent acquisition team. This allowed us not only to have better focus on our work and to better serve our clients, but also enabled us to innovate new – and improve on our current – services.
Employees Becoming Shareholder
Our employee stock program was a huge success, and we were extremely proud to offer partnership to our first 20 employees. The last of those 20 joined us in the autumn of 2021. I feel very proud to say that everyone who we offered the partnership to also wanted to join in. For us founders, FiSe has always been about our common journey, doing great things together and setting the future vision together. It meant the world for for me to have our first employees trust us so much that they wanted to become shareholders.
Altogether, our revenue for this 18-month fiscal year was around €2,679,000 with €236,000 profit, giving us a profit margin of 8.8%. For the calendar year 2021 alone our numbers were around €2,100,000 revenue and €156,000 profit. To give back to the society, we donated 2% of our revenue to Mieli ry.
The biggest growth we saw was in our employer branding service which grew over 1140%. Our talent acquisition service grew 160%. During our last fiscal year our team size almost doubled. We have a hybrid work environment and despite the fact that our office is located in Helsinki, we also have team members in Oulu and Tampere.
Amsterdam Here We Come!
Our original plan was to start growing Finders Seekers abroad in 2020 but the plans got postponed for obvious reasons. In the summer and autumn of 2021 we finalized market research, and concluded our new market, Central Europe, with office location being Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Our plans have been progressing well and at the end of last year we received our first inbound sales lead from Amsterdam (and won the case!).
2022 is almost halfway through, and we are well on track for our financial and growth goals for this fiscal year. By helping our clients to win the tech talent game, we believe we are well on our way to achieve our vision to be the most magnetic tech talent acquisition and employer branding house in Europe by 2025.
