How HeyJobs is Using Snowplow to Become Europe’s Top Talent Platform

Snowplow has been integral to HeyJobs’ growth, powering marketing attribution, product experimentation, and CRM optimization. The platform’s flexibility and Snowplow’s support team have been invaluable as we scale to become Europe’s top talent platform.”

ANDREAS KOUKIAS | VP OF DATA, HEYJOBS

Background

HeyJobs has a vision to become the #1 career platform for essential talent in Europe. Since its foundation in 2016, the company has experienced significant growth. From raising over €40 million in Series B funding, to doubling its workforce and helping 100,000s of people find jobs. And it achieved all this despite there being a labor shortage crisis in Europe.

HeyJobs’ success has not been left to chance. From the outset, the company took an innovative approach to talent acquisition, using AI and machine learning algorithms to identify and recruit essential talent. At the heart of this approach is Snowplow, which HeyJobs has used since its inception to power key analytical and operational use cases across marketing, product, CRM, and finance.

Using Snowplow in conjunction with its cloud data warehouse, Redshift, and activation platforms like Braze and Growthbook, HeyJobs now has the data foundation to drive business results and propel the company on its growth journey to becoming the #1 career platform for essential talent in Europe. Here’s how they did it.

Challenges

Become the #1 career platform in a competitive, shrinking labor market

Across Europe, there are thousands of recruitment sites ranging from large multinational platforms to niche job boards. Combined with the continent’s growing labor shortage, the crowded recruitment market means becoming #1 is no easy task. But in 2016, HeyJobs set out to do just that.

From the very beginning, HeyJobs placed data at the center of its growth strategy. It became clear early on that the company needed a robust, flexible, and customizable data stack to support and scale key business use cases across marketing, product, CRM, and finance. This led HeyJobs’ data, engineering, product, and CRM teams to come together to assemble a data stack that could turn the company’s vision into reality.

Solution

Snowplow forms the foundation of HeyJobs’ data-driven growth strategy

To begin, HeyJobs introduced Snowplow as a fundamental piece of its growth stack. The flexibility and customization capabilities of Snowplow’s BDP product offering were key factors in the company’s decision to choose it over other customer data solutions.

Karolis Stasaitis, Head of Engineering at HeyJobs, elaborated on this point:

Snowplow gives us the flexibility we need by allowing us to integrate the platform with our own database. It also comes with lots of things to get us going such as the various enrichments and contexts that are specific to certain use cases.”

KAROLIS STASAITIS | HEAD OF ENGINEERING, HEYJOBS

The early adoption of Snowplow enabled HeyJobs to form the foundational component of the company’s overall data and analytics strategy, and has since delivered a number of advanced use cases, including:

Unlocking marketing attribution and optimization for customer acquisition

Snowplow has been instrumental in supporting HeyJobs’ marketing and advertising efforts. The company’s marketing team uses Snowplow data to continuously monitor and optimize the performance of its various marketing channels. As Andreas Koukias, VP of Data at HeyJobs, explained, Snowplow data is “used in our customer attribution models, which help us figure out which marketing campaigns are generating which conversions”.

These insights have helped HeyJobs to automate and optimize the allocation of its marketing budget for each campaign to achieve the highest possible return. Snowplow’s server-side integration capabilities also allow the company to send back conversion data to major platforms such as Google and Facebook, further improving the optimization of their paid media campaigns.

Additionally, HeyJobs uses the rich behavioral data it captures with Snowplow to continuously improve its landing page experiences, lead qualification processes, and other key marketing initiatives.

Fostering a culture of self-service experimentation

On the product side, HeyJobs has integrated Snowplow with the Growthbook platform to enable a culture of self-service experimentation.

As Johanna Schwarz, Product Lead at HeyJobs, described:

We integrated Snowplow with the Growthbook platform to give us the ability to define feature flags, run experiments, measure performance, and analyze results – all within the same ecosystem. As we increasingly incorporate experimentation in our culture, our product managers are able to set up and run experiments with minimal support from the analytics team.”

JOHANNA SCHWARZ | PRODUCT LEAD, HEYJOBS

This integration has increased the speed of experiments and enabled product teams to optimize features based on real-time behavioral data tracked using Snowplow. It has also encouraged a “test, measure, learn, improve” mindset across the organization.

Snowplow behavioral data is also critical to HeyJobs’ search optimization efforts, helping the team to continuously improve the relevance and quality of search results on the platform.

Powering personalized CRM campaigns

HeyJobs’ CRM team also relies on Snowplow when optimizing their communications channels, particularly for expensive channels like WhatsApp. To achieve this, the CRM team collaborated with the BI team to develop an RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) model using Snowplow’s AI-ready data. As Pelin Incel, CRM Lead at HeyJobs, explained, “the model tells us which users we should target for WhatsApp.”

By implementing RFM-based segmentation powered by data from Snowplow, HeyJobs can create custom user attributes in its customer engagement platform, Braze, resulting in more sophisticated and personalized customer experiences.

Through testing and optimization, HeyJobs has been able to reduce costs for specific RFM-derived user segments. The RFM model also provided the team with a more robust foundation for personalized user journeys.

Aligning financial planning with marketing performance

Finally, Snowplow plays an important role in HeyJobs’ financial and business planning function.

As Andreas noted, “the tracked performance of our marketing strategies combined with our business costs helps us strategically plan, forecast and allocate our budgets.”

This alignment between marketing data, financial performance, and business planning has been critical to HeyJobs’ operations and its ability to drive growth.

Results

By adopting Snowplow as the foundation of its data-driven growth stack from the outset, HeyJobs has driven significant benefits across the organization, including improved marketing performance, increased operational efficiencies, and cost savings.

Driving marketing efficiencies and boosting ROI

Snowplow has enabled the marketing team to implement more effective attribution and optimization. As a result, HeyJobs has unlocked a high-degree of marketing performance, kept clients happy, and driven an ROI increase . As Andreas explained, Snowplow has been a “key part of our company’s growth in steering and margin optimization – improving efficiencies by generating a consistently high quality of service while optimizing where we allocate our spend.”

Empowering product teams with self-service analytics

The Snowplow-Growthbook integration has created a self-service analytics culture for the HeyJobs product team. As Johanna noted, the company has seen “great time savings on self-service analytics” as product managers are empowered to run their own experiments and analyses. Thanks to this integration, the product team was able to triple the number of experiments conducted and has plans to scale its experimentation capabilities even further.

Optimizing CRM costs through targeted RFM segmentation

Snowplow data has enabled the CRM team to carry out RFM-based segmentation in Braze. This has allowed the team to improve the cost-effectiveness of their WhatsApp communication channel and reduce messaging costs.

Strengthening data governance and transparency

Snowplow has also improved HeyJobs’ data governance and transparency. As Andreas stated:

Snowplow has enabled us to gain a unified view of our data assets. This helps us to ensure transparency, consistency, and reusability of data across all teams. As a result, they can work independently of each other and still make full use of our core data assets.”

ANDREAS KOUKIAS | VP OF DATA, HEYJOBS

Benefiting from Snowplow support

HeyJobs has regular access to the Snowplow support team. As Andreas reflected:

The technical support team has been wonderful to work with, especially with the introduction of new features such as lake loader, Google Tag-Manager, collector configuration and backfilling of failed events.”

ANDREAS KOUKIAS | VP OF DATA, HEYJOBS

Looking ahead

As HeyJobs continues its rapid growth, the company sees Snowplow as a foundational tool for supporting analytical and operational use cases. Key focus areas include further improving marketing attribution and optimization, enhancing the web analytics platform to support cross-functional teams, and integrating Snowplow data with B2B CRM systems to improve the HeyJobs employment offering.

Andreas emphasized that HeyJobs uses Snowplow not only for analytics, but also for “operational purposes” – using the data to make marketing, product, and financial decisions. Snowplow’s flexibility and customization capabilities remain paramount as the company expands its data-driven initiatives in pursuit of its vision to become the #1 career platform for essential talent in Europe.

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