Achieving Hiring Goals
How Etsy solved the problem of disparate analytics and achieved its hiring goals with eqtble
About Etsy
Etsy is a global platform for unique and creative goods. They connect millions of sellers with millions of buyers, facilitating over $10bn in transactions, and have created over 2 million jobs with their employees as the driving force behind their business.
The business operations and workforce have had to keep in step with the growth Etsy has achieved over the last few years. A few months into 2021, after the People Team realized they were not hitting their 2021 hiring goals, they reached out to eqtble.
You can't change what you don't measure.
At the beginning of the year, when they set out goals, the number of planned hires was in sync with the expected rate of growth of the business. In more than a few ways, the planned expansion in human resources kept ahead of the business growth. However, a couple of months into the year, they lagged in their hiring goals by 57% and did not understand why. eqtble's job was to ingest their data, uncover problem areas and recommend potential solutions.
Etsy sees an overnight turnaround in its hiring goals.
eqtble connected to SmartRecruiters, Workday, and Google Sheets, and in under one month, was able to deliver insights to the People and Leadership team. eqtble uncovered two significant issues.
The time between the recruiter stage and hiring manager stage: On average, it took them five weeks after a recruiter met with a candidate to schedule a call with the hiring manager. With the current "great migration," the fight for talent is even fiercer. Companies cannot afford to take five weeks between stages when the competition takes two weeks from job posting to hire. Due to this significant amount of time, candidates (especially high-potential ones) were dropping out of the process.
The recruiter to job ratio: In previous years, when the company wasn't growing more than 15% per year, the ratio was 1:7. With the growth the company was looking to achieve in 2021, the recruiter to job ratio increased to 1:20; this meant that recruiters were tasked with 185% more roles than they'd be usually able to handle. Hence, roles were taking longer to get filled. Time to Hire increased from 26 to 57 days, leading to a leaky bucket effect.
Data-driven decisions
The company reduced the recruiter to job ratio from 1:20 to 1:12 even in a time of rapid growth by empowering and hiring more recruiters. Etsy started reaching its hiring goals as more recruiters had access to their stats. The company reduced the Time to Hire from 57 to 36 days; This included creating a process where the hiring managers could see their analytics in eqtble and hold themselves and their teams responsible. Often, the hiring managers are "too busy," which means scheduling a call could take weeks. The company ensured that people took the goal seriously by holding hiring managers responsible.
Outcome
Overall, Etsy saw a 2x increase in hiring velocity and accomplished its hiring goals in 2021. As their usage of eqtble increased, they saw a direct correlation to a higher recruiter job satisfaction. In turn, the candidate experience improved, and they continued to expand the partnership with eqtble to have greater insight into their metrics. Making data-informed decisions went from a dream to a reality for Etsy.
