Interview with Viivi Marttinen, People Operations Manager at Supermetrics

by Karola Karlson | Sep 22, 2020 | Finland, Startups

Founded in 2013, Helsinki-headquartered Supermetrics has 14,000+ customers in more than 120 countries. 

What do they do? – They build marketing analytics tools, with 10% of global online ad spend reported through their products.

In September 2020, Supermetrics closed a €40M Series B round. 🚀  We’re always thrilled to see companies hiring with MeetFrank succeeding, and were excited to interview Viivi Marttinen, their People Operations Manager.

As the team is working remotely, we were not able to visit their charming Helsinki office with a sleek modern design and do the interview in person. Hope we’ll have a chance to visit Supermetrics in the future. 🌅

Without further ado, here’s our interview with Viivi.

Supermetrics just closed a €40 million funding round. Congratulations! How did you celebrate?

Thank you! 

As we’re still mostly in remote mode, we celebrated in Slack as more and more news outlets published their stories on us. It felt like our efforts were recognized in such a concrete way and the world was celebrating with us.

Did the funding news affect your hiring plans? Are you accelerating the growth of your team? 

Not in a significant way yet, as our hiring teams are still the same size and we don’t want to compromise our recruitment process. 

That said, we’ve been doubling our team every year since our earlier days of 2016 and are continuing on the same track this year.

The world is still recovering from the 1st COVID-19 outbreak. And now there’s a possibility of the 2nd wave. How are you handling this at Supermetrics? 

We’ve all been mostly remote since the start of the first wave in March and still continue to work from home in Helsinki and Atlanta. Our team in Vilnius has a safer overall situation and so they use their office more now. 

Everyone is allowed to work fully from home, and we follow the safety measures recommended by our respective governments and health authorities to make sure we do our own part in keeping ourselves and our fellow people safe.

How has COVID-19 changed your team members’ working habits, work environment, and productivity?

People are different and so moving to a fully remote working environment has served some better than others. 

Many discovered that having fewer distractions increased their productivity. However, we’re a very community-focused team and love to harness the collective intelligence we have here through brainstorming and rely on the overall support of our colleagues. So we’ve had to come up with new ways of connecting even when remote.

Coming back to recruitment at Supermetrics, how is your recruitment and HR team set up?

We have recruitment and HR functions within our People Operations team. There’s 3 of us at the moment. We’re a very flat team and have an organic divide of responsibilities based on our own strengths and aspirations. 

Marika [Marika Salkola, Senior People Operations] is reporting directly to our CEO Mikael and she’s amazing in recruiting, but also shines brightly in HR and has brought a lot of needed developments since joining us a year ago.

Henrika Ekholm, our Talent Acquisition Specialist, joined this summer, and has already brought multiple people into our team! I couldn’t be happier to have her in our team and see her continuing to elevate us further in other areas as well.

How do you usually find the candidates to hire? Do you publish a job offer and just wait? What % of hired candidates has been sourced and headhunted? 

For inbound applications, we mostly use LinkedIn and MeetFrank. We do active sourcing as well, especially for the roles where our need is very specific. We have reinforced our efforts with recruitment partners in Vilnius and Atlanta. 

Out of the 10 most recent hires, 50% were headhunted by our team.

Do you use any other channels for finding different talent? Do you have a different approach to hiring for specific roles?

I think LinkedIn prevails as the biggest platform for all professionals and we use it actively. 

For internship roles, we use a Finnish site Aarresaari to get our job ads in front of students from specific university faculties. Our approach is very unified and simple so that we can make sure we don’t spread ourselves too thin.

How would you describe the tech sector and job market in Finland? Is there a lot of good talent to hire?

I think Finland is a rather small, yet very competitive market when it comes to tech roles. 

We’re often looking for senior talent in PHP, which isn’t winning any popularity contests in Finland, but if we also look into other countries in the EU and Russia, we have a much better chance in finding the people we need. 

While Supermetrics is one of the leading marketing data providers in the world, not everyone has heard of it. How do you usually pitch your company to the job applicants?

It depends on the audience, but at our core, we’re empowering digital marketing reporting and analysis by automating data transfers.

Our usual explanation goes like this:  You know… the ads you see on different social media channels and other online platforms? A marketer somewhere put it there and targeted it to you and they want to measure the impact of their effort. There can be thousands or millions of “you”s however, which makes the data really hard to handle manually, so we automate it and make it fast to get the data they need wherever they need it. 

What would you say are the main so-called selling points for attracting top talent to Supermetrics? How do you convince people to join?

For technical talent with an interest in data, we are a great place to build your skills while creating impactful solutions that are used daily by hundreds of thousands of people. 

Sales talent really wants to help the customers by offering products and services that can make a difference in their performance. I believe we have just that. 

For marketing talent, you get to do marketing – for marketers! And as our products are focused on transforming how digital marketing is measured, you get to be among the trailblazers of digital marketing.

For any talent regardless or their specialty, a great working culture and atmosphere is very important and we’re always eager to share our experience in working at Supermetrics. Work is such an important part of life and the importance of the people around you can’t be denied.

I happened to check your Careers page and saw that you have a beautiful HQ office in downtown Helsinki. Do you think that a high-quality work environment increases the team’s happiness and general output?

I’m so happy to hear you liked our office! It was completely rebuilt for us as an extension of our culture to be a cosy nest for the team and we love it so much.

Having different spaces for silent work, meetings, brainstorming, casual convos and fun aspects helps to shift your focus accordingly, but there’s also a lot of built-in versatility. 

They say if you forgot what you were about to do, you should go back to the room you came from – I believe having a setting like ours is like having mental doors to different mindsets. 

What advice would you give to people looking to get hired in a fast-growing tech company like Supermetrics? 

We like confident people with a specific set of skills and experience. I encourage everyone to explore what it means as well as your own aspirations and drive – what is it that you want to do and achieve right now? – and to bring it to the table. 

Be honest and be yourself! We want to hire people for roles where they can do what they love, have what it takes to succeed, and add something new with their own strengths.

Thanks for taking the time to chat with us! To end the interview, we’ve got 5 rapid-fire questions to you.

What’s your favourite question to ask at interviews?

Tell me about a project that you’re the most proud of and something that you learned from it.

What’s the biggest mistake that job-seekers make when applying to a new job?

Not reading the job description thoughtfully and not telling us why they think it would be a great fit for both. 

What’s the biggest challenge when hiring people to Supermetrics?

We have a very high bar for candidates and tricky requirements at times, which lowers the number of talent we can consider. We’re also not very known outside the digital marketing world yet and so people don’t know to seek us out.

What are your favourite recruitment tools and channels?

LinkedIn, MeetFrank, and our own team’s networks.

If you weren’t a recruiter, what would you do?

The best part of recruitment for me is getting to contribute to a happy and high-functioning culture in such a concrete way, so I think I’d do employer branding or company culture full time.