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Mertcan Uzun is the Senior Manager of People and Culture at Blinkist. Mertcan has been working with Annie Li, our Talent Partner, for the past six months. In that time, Annie has made 14 hires - ranging from Freelance positions to three Director & Head of roles.
To go past the numbers and learn more about the impact of Annie’s time there, we spoke with Mertcan. Together we discussed the benefits of the embedded model, how it helped Blinkist, and Mertcan’s own impressions of ACELR8’s services.
If you want a deeper insight into the role of a Talent Partner, Annie also wrote her own account of her experience over on Medium.
Blinkist
“We are a platform for making non-fiction knowledge accessible. By non-fiction, I mean books, podcasts, etc. Our main goal is to give key insights into this immersive knowledge in a short period of time.”
Blinkist presents in-depth summaries of books in a digestible 15-minute window. With over 5,000 titles to choose from, their focus is on providing excellent, concise content in a variety of formats and subjects.
Blinkist is growing fast, believing in their own product and ambition by planning to make a large number of hires. To do this, they took several approaches, including subscribing to our services.
Blinkist before ACELR8
“So, it wasn’t a sad situation. We were experiencing huge growth, so we had to recruit to sustain the growing demands of the business. To achieve these goals, we trained our hiring managers to become recruiters. This was a very well-functioning initiative, but we had some challenges such as time availability and focusing a lot on hiring instead of leading their functions.”
This is something we experience a lot at ACELR8: a client is growing fast, their recruiting solution worked well, but it can’t keep up with the pace of hiring that would sustain the business needs. That’s why Blinkist’s Talent Acquisition team decided to reach out and ask us to help them keep the quality of hiring high while also increasing the number of hires.
“Overall, we needed to learn how to make hiring a better experience. We are always focused on growth, always focused on high-volume and high-quality hiring.”
By ramping up their hiring quotas, Blinkist’s team was taking a risk - with huge growth came huge responsibilities. To ensure they could hire and onboard enough people in time to meet their goals, they needed outside help.
For the next six months, Annie worked with Johannes, Mertcan, and the hiring managers, creating an in-depth recruitment structure. Along with the high-quality hires, Annie also worked with the team to develop workshops to improve Blinkist’s interviewing skills and approach. She also provided a wide-ranging network of connections and advisors through ACELR8’s contacts and Talent Partners.
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