Study your customers like crazy – State of SaaS Talent Research

Don't focus on your competition. Focus on your customers & their problems. Study your customers like crazy.

When you understand those problems, you can develop products & services that customers will love.

That's one of the reasons why we decided to do a study on Finnish SaaS companies and their situation around talent acquisition. If you know a founder, CEO, or Head of People / Head of HR / Head of TA in a Finnish SaaS company, make sure to ping them in the comments.

Our goal is to interview at least 50 SaaS companies in the Finnish market. To get valuable insights to us, but to share those learnings with SaaS companies as well to have some great benchmarks around data & challenges that other SaaS companies are having.

Here's how we are doing it:

Step 1: Why are we doing this?

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Before starting a project like this, it's important to understand why you are doing it. We have 3 main reasons for this:

1) Build an understanding of our target companies & their challenges so we can better serve them in the future.

2) Share valuable data with Saas companies & how they perform against other SaaS companies regarding Talent Acquisition.

3) Build our brand awareness in the chosen target companies.

Step 2: Figure the target audience

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We started with the following:

1) SaaS companies

2) Markets: Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Estonia & Netherlands (Later, we changed our focus a bit, and in the first stage, we will focus on Finnish companies)

3) Personas to interview: Founders, CEOs, CTO’s & Head of People/HR

4) From Seed to C-round of funding

Step 3: Figure out the questions & create an excel file for data collection

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Here are the questions we are asking from everyone we interview:

1) Role

2) Funding round

3) Current ARR

4) Current Headcount

5) Headcount growth 12 months

6) Yearly Employee Turnover

7) How many people is their recruitment team?

8) Do they have a full-time person for EB?

9) Working with agencies?

10) One-off or ongoing?

11) What are the Biggest challenges at TA?

12) How's the market situation affecting things?

13) Who else should I interview?

And then, we collect the data in this excel file:

Step 4: Have a clear timeline for the project

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In our case, it looks like this:

🌎 January: Collect a list of potential companies to interview.

🌎 January - February: Contact the chosen people & agree on the interviews to the calendar.

🌎 February - March: Interviews with the people.

🌎 April: Collecting the findings & publishing the research.

So it's still a work in progress.

Could you help us?

If you happen to know a founder, CEO, or Head of People / Head of HR / Head of TA in a Finnish SaaS company, please feel free to ping them on LinkedIn!

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