Beyond Resumés with Talentium’s CEO Sebastian Hjärne

It’s great to have you on the call with us. Sebastian, could we start by talking about the launch and the current amount of funding that you have received, and what you're going to be doing with it?

So I think we can start with the fact that this year, we raised around €4 million so far from investors like EQT Ventures, the founder of Klarna – Sebastian Siemiatkowski – and the founder of Sana Labs. In total, we have raised around €10.5 million. This time around, we will be focusing on solving the problem. We’re not building legacy functions with AI or anything like that. We are focusing on the core value and what we are solving. We are solving the hiring process, and we are solving everything related to hiring. That is what we are trying to achieve.

Your product is powered by AI. From the beginning, when a customer has a request about a certain person that they want to hire, they can then search for profiles and also make an introduction, all the way through to hiring that person.

How it works is that you fill out a form and say exactly what you're looking for. You could be looking for a software engineer with four years of experience who has worked with Python and fast APIs, for example. In a couple of seconds, Talentium will then screen thousands of sources, going through every single candidate profile, analyzing them, and providing you with the most relevant candidates. From there, we give you their contact information or ways to communicate with them. Then we reach out to them in a highly personalized and tailored way.

We want to eliminate all the busy work around hiring so you can focus on what truly matters, which is connecting with those talents. We help our clients get to know people behind the resumè or behind the CV. Your team shouldn’t have to sit and take notes in every single call. You should be focusing on getting to know those profiles. And then, from there, of course, Talentium handles everything from inbound application sourcing to your network. We have tons of functions, so we can retain and engage your network very easily. We are handling all the inbound applications, and we can source from every platform out there.

On the customer side, how does the dashboard work? Can they track the hiring process for different roles?

It's simple to use. Just click 'Get started and describe the role you're looking for - whether that's a skillset, experience, or specific qualities. Talentium takes care of the rest. And then, like magic, you see the job getting created in front of your eyes. You also see the talents that are connected, the outreach, and the job description. You can do the job publishing on all the job boards. Everything is created once you click “get started” and write what you're looking for.

What is your ideal customer profile at this point?

Talentium is built for any company that cares about hiring and wants to do it better. Naturally, we’re seeing strong traction from high-growth companies and recruitment firms, where hiring is a core function and speed matters. But the truth is, every company struggles with finding the right people. That’s why we’ve designed Talentium to be flexible, fast, and easy to adopt - whether you’re hiring one role or scaling an entire team.

What kind of verticals do you recruit for?

We cover all verticals. We don’t focus on any particular niche; you can hire all kinds of talent with Talentium.

You started working on Talentium roughly a year ago, right? So you've come a long way in just a year.

Thank you. Yeah, we have been working hard during this past year. And you know, of course, we have an amazing team behind it. And the way we came together is a cool story. We actually recruited our entire team using Talentium, and we have engineers literally all around the world, like San Francisco, Arizona, and Indonesia, and we have never met each other. We hired them through our solution, so that's pretty cool.

Did you meet your founding team through Talentium too?

So, I was looking for salespeople on LinkedIn to do some market research. And I made a job posting, and I got engineers searching for that sales role, and I realized how bad it was. I got completely the wrong people. At the same time, I was searching for engineers, and I got salespeople. So that really didn't work for me. But when I was looking for those salespeople, I found my CTO and engineer, Noah, from the beginning. It was great that I could find him that way. And then we met, and then we were like, “Okay, you know, this process really doesn't work.” That’s when we created an MVP. After that, and using that MVP, we recruited the entire team.

How did you come up with the idea and decide that hiring was a problem that you wanted to solve?

I had two startups before. My first startup, I sold and had an exit with when I was 19. It was a very fast venture, like, seven months, and then all the technology got acquired. I remember sitting and trying to find machine learning engineers, and it was so hard, right? I just realized that the system didn't work. I felt the frustration. I needed five or six or seven different systems, one for recording the meetings, you know, one for sourcing, and then you have the ATS, you needed some personal test tool. And, you know, it all felt so scattered.

I had that data everywhere, and it was so inefficient and very expensive. So, I felt the frustration, and I took it with me. When I started my second venture, it was a little bit different. That company is all about recycling tennis balls. We separate the material from the rubber, and then we get pure rubber, and we're building new playgrounds for children, etc. We're doing it on a pretty large scale, which is pretty awesome. But yeah, I came back to the same problem, again: recruitment doesn't work. So that is when Talentium came into my mind, and I got more and more into it. And, eventually, I just started it and went all in 100%.

Like you said, it all happened very quickly. You must have hit the ground running. But obviously, you've had experience in two different startups before. So, what do you think you're bringing to Talentium, given your past experience as a founder?

I would say I’ve learned to never stop and just to continue doing it. There will be difficult times, and every single company has its challenges. I think it's very important that you don’t stop, you just continue. I have been in multiple shit situations, but what you need to understand is, every single job will have challenges, and you just need to have the right mindset to get past that. I see so many founders and people starting something, and just because it's starting to get challenging, they are closing down and doing something different. You need to be stubborn, and you need to be smart about how you're working. You need to continue to pivot and mitigate. People think, okay, this was the wrong business model or the wrong product. But just continue, and you will find the product market fit, and you will find the market build, and eventually it will come.

You sold your first startup at 19. So, where do you think your entrepreneurial drive or entrepreneurial spirit comes from?

I realized that I love to solve the many complicated and annoying problems I encounter daily, and to do that properly, I needed to start my own venture. I had lots of ideas about how to address these issues, and that's what motivated me to become a founder and launch my first company. It wasn't a predetermined path, but rather a response to the frustrations of things not working the way I thought they should.

What is it about Sweden and its big, successful startup scene? Is there a particular feeling in the startup community in Sweden?

The thing with Sweden, and one thing that both Sweden and Stockholm know, is that everything is about talent. Every single thing that you do and create starts with talent. Talent is the one thing that drives the quality of a company. It’s what drives the speed of a company. For me, talent is everything. What’s different about Sweden is the culture that we have grown up with and the force that we are scaling with. We have companies that find the kind of talent that makes the ecosystem like this possible, you know. Sweden is a country with just over 10 million people, and we’ve built companies like Klarna, Spotify, Sana Labs, and Lovable. Compared to the US, we have one of the largest outputs per capita in terms of startups, which is pretty awesome.

I think what's important to mention here is that we are making it possible for companies to recruit the best talent here at Talentium. Talent is everything. We are making it so that those companies can scale and even be created in the first place.

Would you say there's a strong community between founders in Sweden?

We are building a strong community in Sweden. We also have so many amazing companies trading every single day. And right now, it’s a whole new era with AI, and everything is moving so much faster. And there are a lot of great initiatives.

Like in Sweden, for example, we had one thing called Velocity fellows, which was pretty cool. Swedish founders are going to San Francisco and just seeing what good companies and good technology look like. I was there. It's an amazing setup. There are a lot of hackathons and meetups going on around me. And Anton Osika from Lovable had a cool event at our office where we were invited tech builders. This is what really makes a difference. When you see everyone else building and trying to succeed, it makes things exciting and inspires you to start something and try something else.

Would you say that you had any kind of mentor growing up, someone you looked up to?

Unfortunately, not. I mean, I would say my mother was kind of a mentor. But when I got to high school, I had a lot of people that I looked up to. For example, Sebastian Sematosky, one of the founders of Klarna, and the Spotify founders. I saw what they created, and I was using their products daily, from Klarna to Spotify, and I thought it was so cool. And then, I remember when ‘The Playlist’ came out on Netflix. It was so good and very inspiring for me. And I felt that I could really relate to a lot of things.

Let's move a little bit into the AI topic since Talentium is AI-powered. What are some of the biggest challenges that you're facing with AI at the moment?

AI is amazing in so many different ways if you use it correctly. I think so many companies right now are trying to put AI everywhere, right? They're trying to put the label on every single thing, every single function is AI, and AI seems to be everywhere. I think you need to understand what the problem is that you are solving.

You need to go back to the core issue, because otherwise, you are just automating functions that maybe don’t even need to be automated. Maybe some functions are supposed to be manual. For us, it’s about asking, what are we solving? The hiring process. That is what we are solving with the help of AI.

But the core and the fundamental thing is that we are fixing hiring as a problem, whether we're using AI or doing something completely different with a search engine.

We are very engineering-focused. We have an amazing team, everything from competitive programmers, IOI governmentalists, ICPs world finalists, to, you know, people who worked at NASA. We have amazing, highly ambitious people who are driving these innovations. It's all about talent; that’s where everything starts.

For us, we are always up to date, looking at what's happening, and developing a deep understanding of the space. And, in all the large language models, the agentic space. We are informing ourselves and sharing a lot of stuff. But we are not only working hard. We are also trying to work smart. As much as we can automate, we do, but only good quality automations. Of course, we're doing that internally as well. I can give you an example: we have an agent going through bugs, detecting things, and debugging things automatically. And so right now, we have eliminated that one role, because we need to be efficient.

We’re also working towards a new candidate experience, a new way for candidates to find a job. This is a completely new agent concept and is fully automated. This will be launched soon too.

How many are you on the team at the moment?

We are around 15 people right now. We are pretty engineering-heavy, but we also have a commercial team. We are scaling because we have had some amazing results. A lot of customers are coming and signing up and the solution and want to get onboarded. We are not product-led, but we have around 700 companies that have organically signed up for the waitlist and have scheduled a demo.

And after the launch, in the first 24 hours, we gained interest from another 250 more companies. So, there are almost 1000 companies that want to get into Talentium. That is amazing to see, and also tells me a lot about the problem. You can see how big the problem is with recruitment.

What's the culture of the Talentium team like? And how are you building the team culture with everyone working remotely?

It's highly ambitious. Everyone wants a lot. Everyone is an expert in what they're doing. I don’t like to manage by fear. I hate that. To be honest, for me, it's more about the individual and allowing everyone to do what they want to do. If I hire someone, I truly believe in them. I believe that they will be the ones driving everything and handling their part of the business.

Of course, there will be challenges, and everyone will help each other, but it's very important that my team members also have the opportunity to challenge themselves and handle problems themselves. We have this mentality where everyone wants the best for everyone, and it’s very collaborative. Everyone talks to each other, even if they’re from very different cultures and based in different locations. That’s the team culture.

I'd like to come back to you. You've had quite the journey, and now you're leading your third company. How do you believe your leadership style has changed since you started your first startup?

For me, it's not about leading or not. It's more about the people. Everyone owns their own part of the business. So everyone helps each other. It’s important to me that everyone is thriving. I see myself more as the person going around and picking up things for everyone else and helping them when they get stuck. I’m on site, working with everyone closely. And, of course, we are working towards the same goals together. In that sense, I want to make it so that everyone wants to succeed, and will eliminate the friction so that everyone can succeed.

What would you like to do more of in your life right now?

I’m in a pretty good place right now. Of course, I would like to have some more time to spend in nature. Not just out of the office, but also for peace of mind. Trying to find the work-life balance and building routines can be hard. Because when I start to work, I get into it. I work very hard without knowing how long I've been working, and I forget to have lunch and things like that. In the long term, it’s important to focus on your health too, because mental wellbeing and physical wellbeing go hand in hand. So, if you're feeling good, everyone else will notice too. I need to learn how to have more of a balance.

Why did you decide to partner with Robin Capital?

I met you through a mutual contact and immediately liked you after just one call. I appreciate that you seem to put a lot of heart into your work. You also come across as very genuine and smart. My initial thoughts were positive, and after a few calls, I felt comfortable knowing that you would be there when we need you, even if we’re not in constant contact. The community you’re building is also very interesting and filled with great founders. You’re intentionally creating a space for the companies that you’ve invested in to challenge each other, share insights and knowledge, and build a supportive community, which I find pretty unique. Often, after an investment, there isn't much ongoing engagement, so this community aspect is a significant differentiator for me.

Thank you for your time and insights, Sebastian.

Thank you, Robin.