Our pride for how we help our clients all comes from the people within our team, who are united by a passion for seeing people thrive in a job and organisation they love whilst enabling tech businesses to grow and continue making the world a better place.
Individually though, everyone is unique in their approach, expertise and experience. Our team series celebrates those differences, giving you a closer look at the humans behind the growth and success we’re able to offer to our clients and the tech start-up community.
The latest article puts the spotlight on Niclas Wessblad. With 15 years in the talent acquisition space, he is fundamental in one of Think & Grow's key services which include not just talent search but also setting up essential talent systems and processes, as well as training HR teams.
What are your key areas of expertise at Think & Grow?
I'm an experienced Talent Acquisition leader and strategist with over 15 years of experience in Talent Acquisition and Recruitment. Over the last 10 years, I've been responsible for setting up the recruitment function from scratch for several successful Australian tech start-ups (Campaign Monitor, Hipages, Bigcommerce), while being hands-on with hiring.
My area of expertise at Think & Grow is partnering with start-ups and early-stage ventures to kickstart and scale their talent acquisition and recruitment function. Particularly during aggressive hiring sprints and growth periods, I set up the right recruitment systems, implement recruitment best practices and processes, and train hiring managers and HR teams how to leverage their systems and improve employer branding.
What is it about your role that you are most passionate about?
I'm passionate about setting up start-ups for success using the best possible systems and processes so they can hire and grow at scale. I also enjoy building teams from the ground up and seeing the people I've hired grow within their roles. There's nothing better than seeing, let's say a Junior Software Engineer that I've hired, grow into an Engineering Manager and leading a team of other engineers at the same company months or years later.
As you work a lot with candidates in your role, what advice would you give to people who want to be a stand-out candidate on paper and in person?
If you see a role that you are interested in, instead of just applying to the role and using the generic Linkedin template, just send me a direct message and tell me why you'd be a good fit for the role. It doesn't need to be a long message or a customised cover letter, but I'll gladly read through and review your application and get back to you.
In person, just be yourself. Don't try to be someone you're not during the interview process as it's easy to catch out and it isn't fair on anyone in the process.
What advice would you give to companies to help them attract and retain talent?
People want to work with other great people. Therefore, it's extremely important to hire to best possible people for the business in the early days to set up the right foundation. If you have great people in your business, others will come and they'll stay.
What you say are the foundations that start-ups should have in place to create a seamless and successful hiring process?
You need to have solid recruitment systems and processes in place before you can start to scale your business. Without them, the hiring process and candidate experience will be lacking and hurt in the long run.
What attracted you to join Think & Grow?
For most of my career within recruitment, I had been working with internal recruitment and the last few years before joining Think & Grow, I was doing it through my own business. Running your own business is fun, but it can get lonely sometimes. Like I said, people want to work with other great people, so that's why I joined Think & Grow. There are lots of awesome people here, with lots of different backgrounds and experiences.
Connect with Niclas on Linkedin.
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