Get to know our Sevendos partners: Finitec!
Finitec - Access career-shaping freelance projects with no middlemen.
Sevendos is a newly formed company joining the forces of Polar Squad, Hidden Trail, OrangIT, Wunderdog, Cyberdo, AI Roots and the star of today’s interview: Finitec! Get to know our partners by reading our blog.
I interviewed Rami Hirvelä, a Senior advisor at Finitec who's responsible among other things for sales operations development and marketing. I spoke with him to better understand what their mission is and how they work in the area of software design & development. Read on to get to know them as well!
What is Finitec about?
Put very simply, we provide companies with the best talent from the IT freelance market to suit their needs. The competition is very fierce in that field, but we believe we have a significant advantage because we understand the market. Here’s a few reasons why we believe that.
Compared to consultancies, we are more objective, in the sense that we don’t push our own technologies; we just curate what’s on the market. For example, if a customer of a consultancy agency is looking for a full-stack developer, the consultancy will provide people from their own company, which is a closed system of 10-1000 people; that’s a limited pool of resources. We curate the freelancer market instead, so we are not restricted.
Compared to in-house recruitment, lead-on times can be quite long, so if you need a product version 1 done in 6 months, it’s hard to get started fast, and when the product is done, you don’t have the flexibility to let them go.
There are other agencies In Finland, but here, we are the largest player, which translates into trust. We have been delivering quality since 2005. We have the biggest number of active conversations with freelancers/consultants, mostly due to the fact that we have very well-specified projects from our customers, and our sales team is very mature.
Can you tell me about the history of Finitec?
Founded in 2005, Finitec emerged as Finland's first IT freelancer agency, inspired by founder Pekka Hackspik's experience in the UK. Despite a high demand for IT professionals in Finland, there was no freelancer market there, leading Finitec to initially supply experts from small firms to clients. The establishment of Finitec fueled the growth of freelancing in Finland. The company's growth accelerated in 2009 with Taavi Thiel's addition, boosting sales significantly. This attracted attention from Reaktor and Bravedo, integrating Finitec into their groups by 2013. Finitec shifted its focus to software development after Lauri Jutila and I (Rami) joined in 2017 and 2018, respectively.
I've heard that you prone a systematic approach to what you do. Can you describe Finitec's ways of working?
That's right! We believe in applying a proactive and systematic approach in everything we do. That way, we can effectively identify and fill customers' and talents' needs in a timely manner. We work with sales teams and talent acquisition teams by providing clearly defined roles and work structures, which help us gain customer and talent insight in time to support our customers' business flexibly and proactively by offering fit-for-purpose candidates.
Rami Hirvelä - Senior Advisor at Finitec
How do you ensure quality throughout a project?
Generally, it starts with onboarding. If a freelancer on a project just started freelancing with us, we have a freelancer onboarding process to know things like “what do I need to think about”, etc. Then there’s also customer onboarding, with questions like “how does the process work” or “what kind of meetings will happen” and so on.
When the project has started (usually 2-4 weeks after the signing of the contract), we check in regularly with the freelancer. Depending on the length of the assignment and how many people we have there, we check in regularly (at the wishes of the customer in terms of frequency, but normally we do so quarterly) to see if everything is alright.
From the talent’s perspective, let’s say a freelancer has been working on a 1-year project and they’re on the 11th month of the project. Then we can discuss with them if the contract would be renewed or if we should keep looking for a new contract for that freelancer, so that they have a smooth experience.
What are your future plans at the moment?
There’s three big points worth mentioning here:
The whole cooperation with Sevendos is a huge step and we’re looking forward to evolving with them.
We definitely want to expand our customer base to foreign markets; international expansion is one big topic and is included in our Sevendos strategy.
Generative AI has provided us with a big productivity leap in our ways of working. We’re working directly with the OpenAI API for prospecting customers by picking up buying signals via web scraping and summarizing it for prospecting, understanding our customers better by improving the productivity of our talent teams (matching CVs for example), etc.
How do you envision your collaboration with Polar Squad, and more generally with Sevendos?
We have great trust in Polar Squad’s talent when it comes to DevOps, and more generally in the companies within Sevendos. We are working very hard with them to help them find cases where a collaboration can lead to even greater customer value and talent development. I see the greatest potential where Polar Squad can spearhead a project with a high-end DevOps expertise and advisory requirement, and Finitec then helps scaling the team.