How to Build a Strong Tech Talent Pipeline

Learnings from IPRally’s CTO and Co-Founder

In just under 3 years IPRally has grown from three co-founders to a team of 14. IPRally’s Co-Founder and CTO Juho Kallio has been in charge of the company’s recruiting since the beginning and he has managed to attract the top tech talent to join the team. We sat down with Juho to find out his secret for successful hiring and here are the key takeaways:

1 Write meaningful content to attract meaningful talent

Blog posts have generated some of the best inbound leads when it comes to talent. And it’s not just building awareness. Most of the IPRally team found the blog important when making the decision to join the company. What and how to write depends on the company, but here are some of Juho’s tips:

• Quality matters, as the candidates will read the blog to form their opinion about you.
• Having the whole team writing content signals that people are motivated.
• Tech survey articles are amazing for SEO. Our blog about different deep learning optimizers from 2019 is still a top performer for organic search visitors.

2 Highlight new hires to show they are valued

When a new team member joins the company, IPRally doesn’t just introduce them internally but also posts a short intro on the company’s social media. This is a low effort way of letting it show how much you value the new team members. Top talent also craves to work with their peers, and this is your chance to highlight the quality of the team.

Juho:
Show don’t tell. Instead of claiming that Miika (joined in January) is brilliant, we posted a video of his robot hand side project. Same with Mikko (joined in February) — highlighting that he is the two time Finnish national champion in Magic the Gathering speaks more than saying he is smart. I like to think about this a little already when validating the candidate. What is their superpower? How will the team become better?

3 Getting the potential hires excited about what you do

One of the key success factors in IPRally’s recruiting process is to convey the passion they have for their own product and through that get the potential hires excited about it as well. Whether it’s using a niche programming language or highlighting product features, IPRally’s team is regularly creating content that engages with its audience by telling the company’s story.

Juho:

The best talent has many opportunities and is only rarely looking for something new. In addition, your company is unlikely to be superior to others in every category. Be uniquely good in something, and let that show.

4 Validation

IPRally keeps the bar high in the early filtering. The overall hard tech and opting for a less common main programming language (Clojure) leads to applications that may be fewer but of higher quality.

Juho:
We focus on discussing IPRally technology with the candidate. At this point, it should already be obvious the candidate is good, and we are mostly figuring out how good the match would be. Are we aligned with the key parts that form the tech philosophy of the company?

If we are doubtful about a candidate, we don’t hire. That is also a reason to ask any critical question sooner rather than later. At least early, every new team member should bring something uniquely valuable to the company.

5 Have a pipeline open at all times

Even if IPRally isn’t actively hiring, they want to keep building connections and engage with the tech community on an ongoing basis. Before the pandemic, this was done by organizing and attending meetups and using the lunch as an opportunity to meet with people. During the pandemic, there are fewer opportunities, but IPRally has spent more effort on keeping potential hires informed of the progress via social media and also direct emails. Having an ongoing dialogue with the community is a great way to establish connections and build a solid talent pipeline.

Juho:
Ideally, you would be able to close always, as some opportunities arise only with a small window of time. With a startup, this is not always possible, but realising the value of this can still be useful. The opposite of always closing is trying to close within the smallest window of time. There is a lot of variance in the hiring pipeline — this is why it’s better to at least try to extend the hiring window a bit.

Get enough candidates and have a strong team that keeps the bar high. Your company is who you hire.

About IPRally:

Founded in 2018, IPRally has built a knowledge graph to help machines better understand the technical details of patents and to enable humans to more efficiently trawl through existing patients. The premise is that a graph-based approach is more suited to patent search than simple keywords or freeform text search.

TechCrunch - IPRally is building a knowledge graph-based search engine for patents

IPRally - Press release: IPRally raises €2.0 million to build the patent search engine 2.0