Gideon - Technology

Last week, we had an opportunity to talk to the HR department of one of our oldest customers that started using our recruitment solution since day one of their company. The company we are talking about is Gideon. This Croatian startup helps automate and orchestrate their most complex industrial workflows with scalable and easy-to-use intelligent material handling solutions powered by AI and 3D vision.  

At Gideon , they build powerful visual autonomous mobile robots for unstructured, dynamic indoor and outdoor environments. The robots are specific due to their quick adaptability to the realities of complex manufacturing or warehousing environments and labour variability without the need for infrastructure changes.

To understand how this young and fast-growing startup finds and hires top talent, we talked to Dorotea and Ivana, two members of their young and dynamic HR team. At the start of our conversation, the girls explained to me that their HR team is still growing, and that they are working hard on developing standardized HR procedures. Yet, no matter how young they are, they quickly demonstrated some of the best practices for leveraging technology in recruitment.  

Ivana opened the conversation by saying that since the company was established in the past five years, they reached the number of over 130 full-time employees and are still expanding in almost every aspect of their business. Whether they applied through a job ad, a career site, or are headhunted by HR, each candidate goes through the TalentLyft system, which represents a unique and centralized database. In such a system, everyone involved in the hiring process can quickly revisit each candidate profile, check for potential comments of their colleagues and ultimately, make better hiring decisions.  

For Gideon, hiring a highly competent candidate that is also a good cultural fit is one of the top priorities of the company. To answer to their own needs and hire top talent that would, at the same time, perfectly fit in with the culture of the company, they focused on establishing a standardized hiring system and developed a recognizable employer brand.  

Customizable pipelines

As Ivana and Dorotea mentioned, each candidate entering the company's recruitment process goes through several stages customized on a company level. To make their regular tasks more accessible, they tailored the hiring stages within TalentLyft, for its interface to match the offline work they do with candidates. More specifically, Ivana said:  

“What I liked the most as soon as I started using TalentLyft was the possibility to adjust candidate pipeline stages to our company needs. This feature makes our process more organized, which is particularly important since we work in a highly competitive talent market. For that reason, we always want to provide the best candidate experience possible." 

Leveraging integrations

In the sea of various tasks that HR professionals have to perform in a day, it can be challenging to stay highly efficient and on top of all of them. Here is what Ivana says helps them the most in maintaining a timely communication with candidates:  

"The integration of TalentLyft with Slack is super handy. I like the fact that I don't have to be logged into my TalentLyft account constantly and still keep up-to-date communication with all candidates. I can be carefree while going through my other tasks and sure that I will be notified by Slack whenever a new candidate applies for a position at our company, sends a message, or has any other interaction with us."

While having customized stages and various integrations allow them to adjust the tool to their needs and be efficient at hiring, there are some other aspects of the tool assisting their employer branding efforts. 

Here is what Gideon does to boost their employer brand:

1. Creating a new and recognizable Career Site (that communicates their values and transparently describes the hiring process)
2. Maintaining communication with different talent pools 
3. Promotion of Gideon diverse teams and their achievements 
4. Participation in job fairs, events, university programs, and active involvement in communities 

Recognizable Career Site 

Just recently, Dorotea worked on implementing a new company career site. One of the main goals was to create a space where they will showcase their true spirit, values, and culture to everyone who visits the site. Dorotea said:

"Implementing a new site wasn't technically difficult. The setup is really user-friendly, and I just had to make decisions on what we should display, and soon everything fell into place." 

Even though the site is pretty new, Dorotea mentioned: 

"In just a couple of weeks that our new career site went live, looking into our analytics, we reported an increase in the number of visits and the number of people starting their application for a position at our company."

She also added:

"While talking to candidates about our new Careers Page, we learned that they appreciate having all the latest content displayed in different sections. For example they enjoy reading about our company's story, our team or how our selection process is structured. They mentioned that it nicely portrays our values and what we stand for as a company.” 

Talent Pool Communication 

While having a nice looking and up-to-date career site can go a long way in helping companies attract a lot of talent, it is regular and transparent communication that will help companies build stronger relationships with candidates.

"We created several Pools with candidates that could be a good fit for our company but at the moment do not perfectly reflect our needs. With such candidates, we like to stay in touch and transparently communicate the situation. As a result, most candidates find this satisfying and are happy to take part in future opportunities at our company."- Ivana said.

Even though there is still a lot in store for this young and dynamic team, it is safe to say that we will hear a lot more from Gideon and their upcoming growth. And who knows, for our following conversation, Dorotea and Ivana will have a bunch of new things to say about their hiring and the role of TalentLyft in it. Stay tuned!