Longterm impact of a Talent Partner

A story on how Blinkist stays ahead of the curve in talent acquisition

This past Monday, I just concluded my six-month journey as an embedded Talent Partner at Blinkist. Blinkist was founded in 2013 and offers an app that helps people learn from non-fiction books and podcasts in 15 minutes. When I joined, Blinkist was about 150 people, with an office in Berlin and three remote offices in the UK, Spain, and Finland.

Six months is the perfect amount of time to work as an embedded Talent Partner; it’s long enough for the Talent Partner to create real impact and make hires, and it doesn’t outlive the window of hiring needs. Since my primary mission was to hire people, I helped Blinkist make ten hires and delivered 12 offers in the past six months.

However, it wasn’t just the number of hires that was valuable to the company. Blinkist’s Talent Acquisition team was going through a phase of change and reflection where the team wanted to improve its existing hiring processes, elevate current best practices, and get new TA colleagues up to speed.

A secondary part of my role was to implement a long-term hiring structure and educate the junior recruiters on the best way to hire for their team.

Talent Partner as a Mentor

When I started my project with Blinkist, I was managed by an experienced Head of Talent Acquisition and worked closely with two working student colleagues. The Head of TA made it clear that although hiring was important, it was even more crucial for me to mentor and coach the two working student colleagues. They were both in the first six months of their talent acquisition journey, and so they had plenty to learn.

I started with the basics. I used our weekly sourcing hours as training hours to coach them on sourcing. We went through everything from understanding job requirements and market mapping, to using LinkedIn Recruiter’s filters and evaluating profiles.

To make the sessions more interesting, I created different activities for my colleagues to experiment with their reach-out messages, and showed them what real messages from other recruiters look like, so they can truly put themselves in the shoes of a candidate. My colleague told me afterwards that:

“This is the first time someone really taught me how to do sourcing!”

At ACELR8, it’s not just our responsibility to make great hires, and it’s also part of our role to help companies make great hires after we leave.

With the help of my Engagement Manager, Daniel, I created a Talent Acquisition growth plan for the working students that mapped out the different areas of talent acquisition and tracked their progress.

It’s crucial to ACELR8 that we don’t just focus on the low hanging fruits, but provide long-term and sustainable solutions for the in-house talent team, so they can use our knowledge even after a project ends.

The Talent Acquisition growth plan template.

Talent Partner as Trainer

It’s not just the Talent Acquisition team that can benefit from an embedded Talent Partner; the entire company can too. In the past six months, Blinkist onboarded lots of new joiners, many of them, in turn, became new hiring managers and interviewers. The problem is, they were either new to hiring and interviewing, or they learned very different practices from their previous companies. How could we make sure hiring is done consistently in the company?

Thanks to my ACELR8 colleague Pragnya, who created an interviewer training program, I was able to help design a Hiring Upskill Week for Blinkist.

The Hiring Upskill Week

Hiring Upskill Week is a recurring training program that helps each department at Blinkist ramp up their hiring skills before each hiring cycle opens up. Mondays of the Upskill Week include fun warm-up exercises, context and reason for the training, and interactive workshops on structured interviewing. Tuesdays to Thursdays are scheduled with a few shadowing sessions for participants to see how others to interview. Fridays end the program with a reflective session on learnings from the week.

The Talent Acquisition team was able to see how hiring training could be structured and delivered. They are then left with a clear plan to repeat the Hiring Upskill Week regularly every year and keep improving upon it.

A draft schedule of the Hiring Upskill Week.

Talent Partners Help Benchmark Your Hiring Practices

Over the past years, Blinkist has built a very robust recruitment data tracking system. Numbers such as process duration, time to hire, and relevance are calculated as each hire is made and then displayed on a centralized dashboard.

The team even took the time to map out the number of candidates at each stage of the process for every single hire made this year for further analysis.

However, the numbers on their own don’t tell the full story. Is 30% relevance good enough? What about 14 days for “time to attract”? How do we know if we’re doing well compared to other companies? This is where the unique impact of an embedded Talent Partner comes in.

Based on my experience working with three other clients and ACELR8’s accumulated knowledge from the past five years, I pointed out the metrics where Blinkist performed really well. For example, Blinkist has a very strong employer brand, which means numbers like inbound applications and offer acceptance rates are very high. Areas like process duration could be improved. I also shared industry best practices so Blinkist could take them on and implement the relevant ones accordingly.

The Long-Term Impact of ACELR8

By the time I offboarded on Monday, Oct 18th, not only did the Blinkist team gain ten new joiners but also:

• A concrete plan for the junior recruiters to develop their professional skills
• A detailed Hiring Upskill Week training plan to reiterate
• Industry insights to benchmark their metrics and practices

With this knowledge and tools, Blinkist will be able to hire even faster and better for years to come

At ACELR8, our embedded approach allows us to focus on the root issues and fundamental hiring systems needed within a company. If you are searching for a service that helps you hire better and improve your recruitment approach for the long term, ACELR8 is here to help you.

Reach out to us today to learn more about our embedded services.

Interested in working for us? We’re always on the lookout for talented recruiters that can help us hire better.