Martina Milićević.

Experience

I started my career in sales and marketing before finding my way into Talent Acquisition. As it turned out, the two worlds were not that far apart. Understanding the market, knowing who you are speaking to, choosing the right channel and finding a way to engage the right people remained an important part of my work when candidates replaced customers.

Over time, I moved from recruiting for individual roles to leading international teams and taking responsibility for hiring across 12 European markets. I led teams of up to 25 people and projects involving thousands of hires a year, large numbers of roles running in parallel, multiple languages and markets, and very tight deadlines.

The part of the job I found most interesting was always the situations where things still needed to be figured out: opening a new location, starting recruitment in a new market, building a local TA team, taking over an existing team in another country, or getting major new projects up and running within very short timeframes.

Those situations require more than repeating what worked somewhere else. You need to understand what is actually happening in the market, what candidates expect, which channels work, where the process is getting stuck and what needs to change. The problem is not always where you first expect to find it – sometimes it is in the way you recruit, sometimes in the conditions or expectations, and sometimes the assumptions you started with simply turn out to be wrong.

That is why the numbers themselves gradually became less interesting to me than what was behind them.

Results matter. The people behind them matter more.

Leading people changed the way I look at results. I invested a lot in developing recruiters, and later TA managers, because I saw time and again how much difference a good team can make to the outcome of a project. People you trust, who know what they are doing and understand why they are doing it, can often achieve far more than initially seemed possible.

The relationship between TA and the business proved just as important. The best partnerships with hiring managers and business leaders were not the ones where TA simply took recruitment requests, but the ones where we worked together to understand what the business actually needed and what the market could offer. When both sides understand the same goal and can talk openly about how to get there, the result is almost always better.

Why Talyn

The idea of running my own business did not come overnight. I grew up in an entrepreneurial family, so entrepreneurship was never unfamiliar to me, but Talyn grew primarily out of the experience I had accumulated over the years on the other side of the table.

As a client, I worked with different recruitment agencies and external partners. Some of those partnerships were excellent, others were not, and the difference was not always simply whether a candidate was hired or a project was completed. How we worked together mattered just as much: whether the partner understood what we were trying to achieve or was simply completing a task, whether they said openly when something was not working and why, and whether they brought an idea when we needed to change direction. And, perhaps most importantly, how much ownership they took for the outcome when things did not go according to plan.

That is where the idea for Talyn began.

I want to use what I have learned from leading people, recruitment and projects across different markets to make a real difference to the organisations I work with.