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How we helped Depop scale their engineering team by 75% over a year
51-200
Organization size
135
Hires made
£846,000
Total savings
Talentful really embedded themselves into Depop's team and culture, which meant that we were able to identify strong candidates, run efficient recruitment processes, keep communication high and significantly reduce our time to hire. I would highly recommend the Talentful crew to any company looking to grow their team quickly and efficiently.
Depop is a global fashion marketplace that enables people to discover unique items and buy, sell and connect to make fashion more inclusive, diverse and less wasteful.
Since Depop was founded in 2011, the marketplace has become one of the most successful startups in the fashion resale space. In June 2021, Etsy, a marketplace that connects millions of craft creative buyers and sellers worldwide, signed an agreement to acquire Depop for $1.625 billion.
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The Challenge
Having worked alongside our on-site talent experts for over four years, Depop is one of Talentful’s longest-serving partners. In May 2020, the partnership was renewed with the objective of Talentful owning engineering hiring, including Tech Leads, Scala Engineers and Mobile.
With challenging targets to hit and plans to grow the engineering team by 75% over the coming year, the new team was required to fine-tune some of the hiring processes and align the needs of the hiring managers with the hiring teams.
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Scaling the engineering team by 75% over a year
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Hiring top-tier talent for niche roles
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Aligning the needs of hiring managers with hiring teams
The Solution
Initially, we placed one Talent Partner on-site with Depop, and later increased the size of the team to four talent experts from 2019 up until March 2020. From May 2020 onwards, we made a strategic decision to change the Talentful team to achieve Depop’s new hiring goals, filling niche roles for mobile, scala and product teams. This team was made up of one Talent Lead, two Senior Talent Partners and two Talent Partners. These experts also worked alongside a Talent Director and Managing Partner for extra support, placed by Talentful.
While our previous teams had already put efficient new processes in place, they required tweaking to better represent the new needs of the business and to ensure all interviewers were aligned. Our experts recognized that the London market had been exhausted for some of the more niche roles, so set about reaching further afield across the EU to find untapped talent pools, mainly targeting Eastern Europe with a good Scala presence.
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Streamlined recruitment process
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Discovered new talent pools
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Filled niche roles
The Results
When we began working with Depop in 2017, they were just a team of around 80 people. In the first year of our partnership we helped the resale app hire 44 people and saved the company £308,448. At the end of the partnership, Talentful had contributed 135 new hires, helping Depop save a total of £846,000 in agency fees over four years.
Despite the disruption caused in 2020 by COVID-19, we continued to exceed expectations achieving a 76.92% acceptance rate for hires which, to add context, is within 10% of Google, Facebook and other top tech firms’ target of 85%.
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135 hires made over 4 years
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$1.1m saved compared to an agency model
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76.92% acceptance rate