Today I bring to you another team skeeled article to introduce our Head of Marketing, Brice Kempf.
Brice joined skeeled almost a year ago to lead our Marketing department, based in Luxembourg, and he has since been working on the development of our marketing strategy to improve our brand image and market positioning.
His main duties include managing a team of marketers, coordinating projects with different stakeholders and aligning the marketing strategy with the sales department to help develop the business.
Although working in Luxembourg, Brice lives in France near the border with his wife and their two young daughters. He loves reading a good book to exercise his imagination or learn something new, but he also enjoys putting his hands to work and grow his own vegetables or brew his own beer. And whenever it's possible he likes to ride his bicycle.
I asked him a few questions regarding his professional background and his experience here at skeeled. Check out what he had to say.
1. Tell Us a Bit About Yourself.
Well, I’m a young (I’m only 32) french professional with a bit more than 10 years of experience within the tech & digital industry. After a Bachelor degree in communication, I’ve started my career for an IT consulting company, where I’ve learned the basis of marketing and communication for 3 years.
Unfortunately, the financial crisis of 2008 had a huge impact on our business and in 2010, my employer went bankrupt, leaving almost 100 people out of job. That experience was a bit traumatic as it was my first job, but in the end, it turned out to be an opportunity. In fact, I decided to get back to school to attend a Master Degree in Digital Economy at the University of Strasbourg.
I moved to Strasbourg for 2 years, passed my Master degree and worked for several digital agencies. Then I decided to come back to Luxembourg, where I entered the startup ecosystem. I quickly specialised myself in the digital marketing area for several startups and then finally got upgraded as a Head of Marketing for 3 years now including almost 1 year at skeeled.
2. How would you describe your role and objectives at skeeled?
When I started at skeeled, I quickly realised that a few strategic aspects of marketing had not been addressed yet, meaning that it was a land full of opportunities for me. I decided to start working on defining a new marketing roadmap and putting in place major changes with the aim of improving our brand image and market positioning.
My initial role was then the one of a challenger and a strategic planner. After a few months and several milestones reached, my role slightly evolved, and I’m now more like a bandmaster managing a team of marketers or coordinating projects with different stakeholders (internal or external). Consequently, my objectives have changed as well. Now I’m more focused on managing a lead generation model in order to help our sales team develop the business at an international scale.
3. You joined skeeled almost a year ago. What projects have you been working on and what has changed most about the way we work since you joined?
The first major project I initiated was to set up a content marketing strategy in order to prepare the field for the launch of our new website. It was pretty clear for me that, if we wanted to reach our objectives, we needed to improve our online presence to showcase our great product to our potential clients and also explain a bit better its awesome features.
It took us a few months to develop a state of the art new website, but it was worthwhile to do it. Since we released it, our lead generation machine is 5 times more efficient!
4. Working in th HR tech industry, what has been your greatest challenge yet?
Historically, HR departments are a bit late in terms of digitalisation, so my biggest challenge was to adapt the communication about our software to the HR professionals readiness, especially in terms of Artificial Intelligence. We are only at the beginning of a new era, and this revolution will deeply change all industries including human resources and recruitment, but we have to be careful in the way we evangelise them to avoid any fear or misinterpretation.
5. What do you like the most about marketing?
Marketing is not a matter of business processes anymore. Thanks to the digitalisation, it became a real mindset that can apply to everything (not only in your work). That is what Philip Kotler started to define when he invented the concept of holistic marketing. If I had to pursue his thoughts I would say that nowadays the essence of marketing is basically to get the best out of what you have to increase the bottomline results.
6. What innovations or industry trends do you think are the most important to keep an eye on?
Recruitment processes will change a lot more in the next few years with the arrival of new artificial intelligence based automations. These kind of automations will allow HR departments to target the perfect candidates out of the mass and almost hire them in 2 clicks.
CV screening will be history as much as sourcing as we known it. Classical interviews are also threatened because video interview tools and virtual reality are already strongly changing the way we interact with applicants. Instead of organising costly and time consuming onsite interviews, recruiters will be able to fully digitalise interviews, meaning that a lot more candidates will be allowed to access this sensitive step of the recruitment process.
Softwares will once again screen and analyse candidates’ performance in the videos and push the best candidates to the next steps. All these changes will deeply improve the quality of the recruitment process, leading to more qualified candidates and also a better understanding of their soft skills for recruiters.
Here are the links to the other articles of our "Meet the team" series:
The Founders: Mike & Nicolas Head of Engineering: Artur Head of Sales: Olfa Psychology Expert: António UI/UX Designer: Michael
Skeeled offers you the perfect opportunity to bring innovation and digitalisation to your hiring. Check our website or our LinkedIn and Facebook pages for further information.
Thanks for reading and see you next time!
Your team here at skeeled
