Exceeding high expectations with Saxo Bank

Even for experienced hiring managers, finding a specialist for your digital marketing team can be a challenge -- particularly in Belgium, with the tight talent market and varied language requirements. When Eddy van Geyte, Head of Marketing at Saxo Bank Belgium, needed a diversely skilled expert for his team, Ariad worked closely to bring perfect-fit talent quickly. Read about Eddy's experience:

"At Saxo Bank Belgium, we are a subsidiary of Saxo Bank HQ in Copenhagen. Formerly, we were a subsidiary of the head office in Amsterdam, both of which have a centralised human resource department. It's policy within Saxo Bank that local leaders and team leaders do the recruitment and onboarding of new hires themselves. We get a lot of support from HQ about the process itself. Typically we do well, but for this one special role, we spent nearly a year with no success. We just couldn’t manage to find suitable candidates. It’s not as easy as it seems! It's a very tough business."

The speciality staffing challenge

I was introduced to Ariad by a colleague of HR for help with this particular role. The function itself has more to do with customers and potential customer engagement, and it was a very diverse profile we were aiming for, in a way that this person should be able to work a lot independently, but also in close collaboration with their colleagues in the other markets, as well as HQ. This person needed to be very proficient in dealing with content in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of formats. And last but definitely not least, within the Belgium landscape, having multiple languages is important, as well as some senior experience. Given all of that, it was a challenge and that’s why we came up with working together with Ariad.

The first three or four months when I was searching to fill this role on my own, or together with the HR business partner, it took quite some time, effort and resources. When Ariad joined, it relieved me from a lot of day to day hassle (if I may call it like that!). I could return back to my other marketing priorities and my team.

"When Ariad joined, it relieved me from a lot of day to day hassle. I could return back to my other marketing priorities and my team."
Eddy van Geyte, Head of Marketing @ Saxo Bank Belgium

Finding the perfect fit

First of all, the hands on approach immediately after we sent the description of the profile was fantastic. Ariad quickly called me back on a Friday evening for some more background information, to get more familiar with what kind of candidates we were really looking for, and together with that information they were able to start the next day. Within a few days, I already had the first candidates in my mailbox. So you can see, it was very hands-on, which I liked very much. Because it's for me also our way of dealing with things internally within Saxo Bank, so it was great to see that our external business partners act the same way.

It became clear that we needed to lightly fine tune the kind of profile we actually were aiming for, and Ariad helped a lot with that. It was a good journey for me to understand the right candidate profile even better along the way. The role was tweaked a little bit further down the road when we got more and more candidates entering in and we had a clearer vision. The quality of the candidates was great, and soon we had two or three potential candidates which we could choose from.