Dyneval

The Recruitment Challenge

Despite the challenges of COVID, Tiffany and her team were able to deliver a fantastic pitch to the judges at Scottish Edge, and they won the prestigious IBioIC Edge awards for Round 17. They were awarded £100k of funding.

Speaking after the award, Tiffany said,

"The team at Dyneval is absolutely delighted to have won the Scottish Edge. This award will accelerate our market readiness and growth to build a Scottish business that will have a strong and positive impact on the profitability and sustainability of dairy farming worldwide."

This win, allied to other successes such as joining a project led by RAFT Solutions and Innovations UK-Canada, ramped up the need to grow their team.

However, this being quite a niche industry and Dyneval being an early-stage business, there were two main challenges when it came to recruitment.

Brand recognition was almost non-existent as they had not long spun out of Edinburgh University.
As a very early-stage business, confidence in moving to a company that doesn't have a long runway in terms of funding is not always attractive.

The Solution

The team at TalentSpark relish these challenges. We know the value of the right people in growing a business, particularly in finding the right cultural fit for a small organisation.

The positions that required filling were quite varied. The product needed further development, the brand needed developing, and someone needed to be out selling the product.

So, we set about tackling the two problems head-on.

First, we developed an awareness campaign that would help explain to potential employees what Dyneval did.

The campaign included a microsite highlighting the company's background and journey so far, answering some of the potential questions people would have.

This was backed up by a social media campaign targeting specific skills across LinkedIn and lookalike audiences across other channels.

Finally, we targeted our extensive database of candidates, making them aware of the exciting opportunities available with Dyneval.

This has two benefits: It gives our team the right tools to approach potential candidates, and it also helps to sift out those for whom the roles with Dyneval were just not right. Those who would be nervous about working with such an early-stage startup, or those for whom an agritech B2B product did not float their boat, would never be right.

We also spent a good bit of time with Tiffany and Vincent to really understand their business, which made the headhunt we conducted, following the awareness-raising, far more effective. This approach ensured we only put the right people in front of the Dyneval team.

The Results

As part of the initial project, there was quite an eclectic list of roles to work on, including:

Software Developer
Product Manager
Full Stack Developer
Data Engineer
Project Manager

We then followed that up with more customer-facing roles, including:

Commercial Lead
Customer Support Assistant
Office and Customer Service

The team worked with Tiffany to arrange the interviews, prep our candidates and then managed the communication from offer to starting in the role and their first three months in post to ensure a smooth transition and a successful placement.

Dyneval now has a great team on board and is going from strength to strength. They have secured over £1.8m in investment and are working with cattle farmers worldwide.