Skyrocketing Sunly with 15+ greentech hires
Sunly is a renewable energy developer shaping a cleaner future in the Baltics and Poland.
Read more: Estonian-founded Sunly raises €200m to speed up renewable energy production in Europe
The story
Founded in 2019 by Priit Lepasepp, Sunly is a renewable energy company supplying the Baltics and Poland with sustainable electricity through solar and wind parks. Sunly prioritizes environmental friendliness and works closely with landowners, local communities, authorities, grid operators, and green energy investors.
In October 2022, Sunly announced an investment round worth €200M to triple its team to 400+ employees and expand its renewable energy portfolio in Europe.
Greentech
Industry
Website
The challenge
Large-scale hiring project
After a substantial funding round in 2022, Sunly was poised to triple its team in size. Yet, fast growth meant that the hiring managers for each role hadn’t been in the company for a long time. This led to unclear hiring needs, resulting in a rapidly changing project for the TalentHub team.
Hiring process
The Sunly team has been closely involved with the entirety of the recruitment process. Our team takes care of the screening and pre-selection of candidates before sending suitable profiles over to Sunly for interviews. Depending on the role, Sunly conducts a home task assessment and 1-3 interviews with the candidate.
In this 60-minute call, our recruiters introduce the candidate to Sunly.
- 1371 Sourced candidates
- 305 Screenings
- 46% Response rate
The submitted candidate then has a conversation with the hiring manager at Sunly.
The goal of the case study is to assess the candidate’s technical skills.
Sunly asks candidates to complete a home task for most roles.
The goal of this step is to understand whether the person would excel at the challenges they’d face in their role at Sunly.
After each interview round, we ask candidates for feedback. This is to understand the person’s motivation for Sunly and potential concerns.
The final step includes making an offer to the selected candidate(s).
Hiring cultural fits
An important soft skill that Sunly looks for in its candidates is a can-do attitude and teamwork. We’ve assessed these traits in interviews by asking candidates situational interview questions about their previous group projects and understanding their impact.
Our approach has been to assign two recruiters to most projects, and divide the tasks between sourcing and conducting interviews. In total, we’ve had a team of eight strategic recruitment partners providing an in-house partnership to Sunly.
For sourcing top talent, we’ve mainly targeted candidates from the Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Polish markets.
Crafting a new careers site
For the majority of roles, we also designed a landing page that represented Sunly’s mission and brand. This boosted talent attraction as candidates could read more about Sunly’s work culture, values, and offer package.
An example of a landing page can be found HERE.
Together, we’ve been able to successfully fill key roles, including:
Communications Lead (time to fill 35 days)
Sunly City Sales Engineer x2 (time to fill 55, 62 days)
Internal Communications Lead (time to fill 70 days)
IT Manager (time to fill 52 days)
Sunly City CEO (time to fill 85 days)
Recruiter (time to fill 42 days)
Project Manager (time to fill 91 days)
Environmental Expert (time to fill 35 days)
Office Manager (time to fill 28 days)
Copywriter (time to fill 26 days)
Marketing Lead (time to fill 113 days)
Legal Counsel (time to fill 60 days)
IT Support (time to fill 66 days)
The highlights
#1 Hiring a Sunly City CEO
#2 Hiring an in-house recruiter
Considering the hiring intensity of Sunly, it was best for the company to find an in-house recruiter to collaborate with TalentHub. Despite this decrasing our workload, our priority is always to find the best solution for our partners.
#3 Successful workshop
Our co-founder Reet conducted a recruitment training session for team leaders at Sunly. The topics covered were how to conduct interviews, and how to build a great team from scratch.
In need of great talent? Book a free consultation with us today.
Piret Ulm
Partner Lead/Recruitment Partner
piret@talenthub.ee
