25+ technical hires within two years
Pactum is building an AI-powered tool that negotiates contracts on a mass scale. Today, the company deals with Fortune 500 clients such as Walmart and Maersk Group.
The story
Founded by luminaries from Skype, Starship Technologies, and the government of Estonia’s e-Residency program, Pactum’s three co-founders saw an opportunity to leverage technology to generate more valuable and sustainable negotiation outcomes.
Several Fortune 500 companies use Pactum’s AI tool to automate negotiations and provide increased value for suppliers and customers.
The Mountain View-based company has raised €12.4 million in funding and has most of its technology and operations team based in Estonia.
SaaS
Industry
pactum.com
Website
The challenge
Hiring top talent from the Estonian IT market.
In Estonia’s emerging start-up scene, many companies are doing world-changing things. The working environment is great, and the best talent usually gets treated fairly. Due to this, as well as the ongoing war and pandemic, people aren’t keen on changing employers.
Hiring process
Topics covered in this 45-minute call:
- Introducing the candidate to Pactum
- Painting an authentic picture of the opportunity
- Describing the technology at Pactum
The candidate then gets to choose whether they would like to have a conversation with the hiring manager, or move straight to the case study.
The goal of the case study is to assess the candidate’s basic technical skills.
For Pactum, it’s important the candidate is interested in their mission. Technical skills, whilst also important, can be learned.
The goal of this step is to understand how the candidate collaborates with others and whether they would excel at the challenges they’d face in their role at Pactum.
Regardless of the outcome, each candidate will have a constructive feedback session with the hiring manager.
The final step includes making an offer to the selected candidate(s). What’s amazing is that Pactum uses its own negotiation tool to make a job offer.
Understanding the hiring needs
When Pactum has a hiring need, their hiring manager will contact our Partner’s Lead, Piret. From there, the first step is helping to identify the candidate profile. Essentially, we take on the challenge of who needs hiring.
Once we identify the candidate profile, the recruitment process starts. For sourcing, our headhunters must understand the search terms, so we can identify the channels where to hunt down talent. In the case of Pactum, the search terms connect to their operating technologies, which include Typescript and Kotlin.
Although we’ve mainly sourced candidates for Pactum from the Estonian IT market, we’ve also looked at hiring talent from nearby countries, including Finland, Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania.
Cultural fit over technical skills
To be successful in a high-growth startup like Pactum, you need to grow with the company and be open to feedback. Our candidate pool for Pactum consists of people with experience working in startups. Successful candidates also must have a product-oriented mindset.
We’ve used competence-based conversations to assess the candidate’s cultural fit with Pactum.
Examples of the questions we ask candidates:
- What’s the most exciting project you’ve worked on?
- Tell me about a time when you have delivered on ambiguous terms and requirements.
Transparent hiring process
The hiring process, from top to bottom, has been built to paint an authentic picture of what it’s like to work at Pactum. Our recruiters have always been there to fill any information gaps between the candidate and the hiring manager. For us, it’s always about finding the best deal for both sides.
Together, we have been able to successfully fill key roles, including:
- Senior Software Engineers
- Supplier Success Managers
- Data Analyst
- Technical Implementation Manager
- Office Manager
- Negotiation Engineer
- Program Managers
- Product Lead and Product Managers
The results
#1 Established an efficient hiring process and recruitment materials
#2 Hired several leads and managers
Out of the 25+ hires we’ve completed over the past two years, many have been for managerial roles who have proceeded to become team leads in their respective departments.
#3 Helped Pactum expand its recruitment operations to the United States
Kicked off Pactum’s recruitment operations in the US by helping them find local cooperation partners.
In need of new talent? Book a free consultation with us today.
Piret Ulm
Partner Lead/Recruitment Partner
piret@talenthub.ee
