Amazon QuickSight helps TalentReef empower its customers to make more informed hiring decisions

This post is co-written with Alexander Plumb, Product Manager at Mitratech.

In this post, we show how TalentReef used Amazon QuickSight with the intent of replacing their legacy business intelligence (BI) reporting. TalentReef, now part of Mitratech, is a talent management platform purpose-built for location-based, high-volume hiring. TalentReef was acquired by Mitratech in August 2022 with the goal to combine TalentReef’s best-in-class systems with Mitratech’s expertise, technology, and global platform to ensure their customers’ hiring needs are serviced better and faster than anyone else in the industry.

The TalentReef team are experts in hourly recruiting, onboarding, and hiring, with the mission to help its customers engage with great candidates utilizing an intelligent, easy-to-use single platform. TalentReef differentiates itself from its competitors by not just building features, but creating an entire talent management ecosystem on the idea of eliminating friction and making the hiring and onboarding process as smooth and easy as possible for their customers and applicants.

The team found QuickSight easy to use and developed two new dashboards that replaced dozens of legacy reports. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, leading to the development of two additional analytics dashboards, Job Postings and Onboarding, both set to be released in the first half of 2023.

The following screenshot shows the Applicant dashboard, which is used internally by TalentReef Customer Solution Managers as well as externally directly by customers embedded within the talent management application. This dashboard provides quick access to their customers’ important metrics. For example, it shows the total number of applicants for all the job postings. It also shows how many applicants are present in the system by position.

Providing clarity to customers for hourly workforce hiring

The war for talent is top of mind for those hiring within the hourly workforce. Hiring managers are constantly looking for top talent and trying to understand where they came from, why they are applying, and more. They want to see how their job postings are performing, if there is a drop in any posting, and opportunities to optimize their process. TalentReef’s previous solution wasn’t designed to convey this information, and required manual intervention to extract these hidden insights from multiple reports.

With the new dashboards embedded directly into TalentReef’s customer view, the development team is able to streamline their data ingestion process to ensure up-to-date data is available to their customers within the TalentReef platform. QuickSight features such as forecasts, cross-sheet filtering, and the ability to drill into underlying data allows customers to quickly see the value through different lenses.

Whenever a new feature was rolled out in the previous solution, it wasn’t possible to gauge the impact it had on applicants and new hires because it required a lot of manual work. Development teams had to provide a raw data file to internal users, upon request, to show the value of the new feature, and even then it was limited in how they could show value. With QuickSight, not only are they able to show the value of new features quickly, but they can do so without development intervention.

Data visualization helps business analysts scale client support

The sheer volume of our datasets made gathering insights a slow process. Not only that, but datasets weren’t accessible to a wide audience outside our team, such as partners, program managers, product managers, and so on. As a result, Business Intelligence Engineers (BIEs) spent a lot of time writing ad hoc queries, which then took a long time to run. When the insights were ready, BIEs were tasked with answering questions via manual processes that didn’t scale.

On September 6, 2022, TalentReef launched two new analytics dashboards, Applicant and Hire, which are embedded into their customer application. Since the launch, TalentReef has seen usage increase over 20% and has saved manual internal resources hours of their time putting together insights for their customer base during QBR calls that now can be accessed directly from the dashboards. With TalentReef’s previous tool, reports were unstable and would time out, which required development teams to troubleshoot and repair. Since implementing QuickSight, TalentReef has found efficiencies for both internal resources as well as customer hiring managers, and are confident in the ability to meet the demand of these users.

The following image demonstrates UTM parameters (Urchin Tracking Modules—a tracking device that helps get really specific with the traffic source). This dashboard enables TalentReef’s customer base to understand where their applicants are coming from, so they know where to invest their recruitment dollars (whether the applicants came from indeed.com, or google.com, and so on). This embedded dashboard even allows users to drill further into their data, understanding the name, date, location, and more that the UTM source is tied to.

QuickSight has allowed TalentReef to unlock insights that were not previously attainable, or very manual to derive, from their previous reporting tool. An example of this in the following image is the average time to review an application. In the war for talent, minutes can make a difference between finding the individuals needed to fill a position or letting them slip through the cracks. This type of information gives leadership advantage to know where to focus their attention and help win the war for talent in the hourly workforce.

Unlock the power of applicant and hire data to get insights you never had before!

Our customers have been extremely impressed with our QuickSight dashboards because they provide information that was previously unavailable, without manual effort by development teams. The interactive nature of the QuickSight dashboards allows TalentReef’s customer base to dive deeper into the applicants and hired candidates, for example to understand from where an applicant came from or how an applicant applied to a job posting.

With QuickSight, not only can we visualize applicant and hire data in multiple, meaningful ways for our customer base, but also we can help them see the ROI from additional products they’ve added on to the platform. In the following example, we have a variety of filters that allow clients to see if their sponsorship dollars are returning successful hiring applications, if their add-on of chat apply brings higher application volume, if the applicant came from text to apply, and more.

Innovating faster with intuitive UI, increasing customer satisfaction

QuickSight enables TalentReef to innovate faster in response to customer feedback. With the intuitive UI and native data lake connections of QuickSight, TalentReef’s product team is able to quickly build visualizations based off the needs and wants of all their customers.

TalentReef’s previous reporting tool required manual efforts from development teams. Enhancements and bug fixes required prioritization against other initiatives and had a higher likelihood of error. With QuickSight, TalentReef was able to set up a data lake that allows dashboards to be built and innovated on by the product team, freeing up development resources to continue on the highest priority. Developers get the data into the data lake, and then the product team pulls in the data into QuickSight and deploys it as needed. This has lead to higher customer satisfaction both internally and externally with the quick turnaround time.

The right people with the right information

In any type of HR space, the right level of data access is key to make sure you aren’t leaving yourself open to compliance issues. Our development team developed a solution that is able to be applied across all QuickSight dashboards using row-level security on the dataset.

TalentReef’s partnership with QuickSight has enabled us to unlock insights that were previously difficult or impossible to attain. We’ve allowed our customer base to know what is happening and why it is happening, and visualize data that is most impactful and important to them.

To learn more about how you can embed customized data visuals, interactive dashboards, and natural language querying into any application, visit Amazon QuickSight Embedded.

Join the Quicksight Community to ask, answer and learn with others and explore additional resources.

About the Authors

Alexander Plumb is a Product Manager at Mitratech. Alexander has been a product leader with over 5 years of experience leading to highly successful product launches that meet customer needs.

Bani Sharma is a Sr Solutions Architect with Amazon Web Services (AWS), based out of Denver, Colorado. As a Solutions Architect, she works with a large number of Small and Medium businesses, and provides technical guidance and solutions on AWS. She has an area of depth in Containers and Modernization. Prior to AWS, Bani worked in various technical roles for a large Telecom provider Dish Networks and worked as a Senior Developer for HSBC Bank Software development.

Brian Klein is a Sr Technical Account Manager with Amazon Web Services (AWS), helping digital native businesses utilize AWS services to bring value to their organizations. Brian has worked with AWS technologies for 9 years, designing and operating production internet-facing workloads, with a focus on security, availability, and resilience while demonstrating operational efficiency.