A new Danish-Dutch partnership has been born. Candidate Experience analytics platforms Starred and Talenthub have merged. ‘We believe we form two missing pieces of the winning tech puzzle together’, says Lars van Wieren, who will continue as COO of the company, in an interview with Recruitment Tech.
Room for analytics
Analytics: it is the common ground between Dutch company Starred and Danish company Talenthub. Starred is a recruitment analytics platform, founded in 2012 by Lars van Wieren and Mark Berendsen. The company performs those analytics for a nice portfolio of clients, including Coca-Cola, PwC and Deloitte. “We give them the right tools so they can optimise their recruitment process as well as the candidate experience”, states Van Wieren.
Talenthub, meanwhile, was founded in 2017 by Daniel Birkholm. It has its origins in recruitment marketing. Over the years, it has grown into one of the largest platforms for measuring candidate experience data. It does so for JustEat — and well-known Scandinavian brands such as JYSK and Volvo, among others.
Complementary visions
“In many ways, Starred and Talenthub are a good fit”, says Van Wieren, who was particularly charmed by Talenthub’s vision for the market. “They look beyond pure feedback on the recruitment process. They see that our clients are currently turning down millions of candidates, who are still looking for jobs as a result. When we then offer them access to a candidate portal on behalf of the company that rejected them, and still manage to help them find a dream job, this reflects very well on the company that rejected them earlier. So we can make other clients happy by supplying talent.”
‘Inefficient to compete with each other’
For example, Van Wieren and Birkholm regularly met on days when business was pitched for. “The market is relatively new, which makes it very inefficient to constantly compete with each other. Merging will make it easier to jointly grow this market and also make product developments go faster.”
Van Wieren is also enthusiastic about his new business partner. “Birkholm has worked in the recruitment market since he was 17. He knows what he’s talking about and what it takes to build a big company and make it successful. He gets excited about the work that I would rather leave to someone else. In addition, we have a lot of fun together, an essential component for a long-term partnership.”
From CEO to COO
Van Wieren’s job title will change within the new organisation. “I will become COO: Chief Operational Officer. Although this sounds very ‘operational’, it is actually more about the company, than working in the company. I am a big supporter of the scaling up methodology, based on the Rockefeller Habits. We have successfully applied this within Starred, which ensures that everyone knows what is expected of them, so there is no drama and people go to work engaged. I can’t wait to apply this to our new company as well.”
Hurry slowly
Despite the merger of the two companies, both will continue under the same brand name for now. “The product we use to collect feedback on the recruitment process will continue to be called Starred, the portal we provide for candidates will be called TalentHub. We are still looking at whether we will work with and umbrella name, but the internal theme of this merger is ‘Hurry Slowly’, so we are not making any hasty decisions here either.”
“We ultimately want to position the new company as the world leader in Candidate Experience.”
In this, the focus will be on resources that better guide the candidate through the recruitment process. “We ultimately want to position the new company as the world leader in Candidate Experience. We want to make everything as easy and enjoyable as possible for candidates. And we can do that now, with the additional bundled resources we have. In addition, we found out that we both had some of the winning pieces of the tech puzzle. As a result, this merger will also speed up the process of opening an office in the United States.”
