Matej Matolin is head of HR at STRV, a software design and engineering company located in Prague that works for top Sillicon Valley clients. We are very happy to have him back at Talent Acquisition Live this year after giving a very highly rated session last year.
Matej, you are very passionate about delivering a great candidate journey. But just to make sure we are all on the same page, what do you see as the typical candidate journey?
“Candidates are similar to customers. You won’t buy from someone you don’t know, and you will buy at a time best for you. That’s why brands have switched from selling to building relationships. Before anything else, you have to attract customers with interesting and useful content, build your authority, and explain your added value. Only then can you start selling. I believe the process is exactly the same in recruitment.”
STRV requires you to attract the infamously hard-to-recruit IT developers from all over the world. Content plays a big role in this. What makes your content stand out?
“Content must bring real added value. You won’t engage the tech community with press releases, corporate propaganda or recruitment articles. Therefore our content isn’t produced by HR or marketing. We involve all of our tech experts in writing technical articles, providing mentorship, giving public speeches, and creating tutorials, online lessons and workshops.
Good content attracts passive candidates to your website, and these are people you can then transform into regular visitors, readers, fans, and ultimately applicants.”
I remember an awesome presentation by you in Berlin. You covered how you measure candidates’ various signals in order to classify their engagement as a candidate – and you build a strategy based on those levels of engagement. Can you elaborate a bit on this?
“We have an engineering newsletter that we send to subscribers, and we can easily identify the most loyal readers and those who click on job vacancies. This information is then synced with our ATS. We also know who the frequent visitors of our events are. We use ad retargeting to deliver information based on past behaviour. Our latest achievement is the implementation of attribution modelling. I’m eager to share more insights in my talk.”
You’ve said in the past you use technology to make recruitment more human. Where do you see the future of the recruiter going?
“There will definitely be more technology: chatbots, automation, programmatic advertising, assessments… you name it. But human interaction won’t disappear. It’s the quality of relationships that companies have with candidates and with the community that will matter most. Technology is just a tool. Successful recruitment teams must balance both sides and be composed of people with various skill sets, including technical geeks and data analysts.”
With his company STRV he partnered with