Harver employs data to transform the modern hiring experience
About Harver
Harver is a cloud-based pre-employment testing solution that helps recruiters manage processes for assessing candidates by collecting relevant data and ranking applicants according to available job roles.
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Contact usHarver transforms its hiring experience with Looker to continue its vast growth.
Google Cloud results
- To meet growing enterprise demand for real-time analytics, Harver leveraged the Looker data application platform to launch Harver Insights, an embedded analytics suite
- This product offering enables Harver’s customers to visualize the outcomes and operations of their digital HR transformation at scale through self-service business intelligence and curated, on-demand dashboards
- Insights help customer’s bridge common data gaps by ingesting data from adjacent systems in their tech stack, while also providing a rich analytics experience for Harver’s native matching and automation capabilities
- With Harver Insights, talent acquisition leaders have been able to scale hiring, reducing the length of the hiring process while handling increased applicant volumes
- Since deploying Powered by Looker, Harver was able to provide a best-in-class purpose-built analytics platform for its customers, allowing their own engineers to focus on its native psychometric matching and working automation technologies
Harver, a leading pre-employment assessment software company, enables its customers to transform their hiring process into a digital and fair experience.
Founded in 2014—and now with offices in New York, Amsterdam, and London—the company uses data and machine learning to automate parts of the application, interview, and hiring process for some of the world’s largest global brands, including Sitel, McDonald’s, Heineken, and KPMG.
“The need for controlled agility has never been greater. Agility comes from information and that information needs to be accurate and up to date, and it has to be available anytime.”
—Barend Raaff, CEO and co-founder, HarverFrom the beginning, team leads at Harver knew data was a critical component to the success of their platform—as well as their customers. “The need for controlled agility has never been greater. Agility comes from information and that information needs to be accurate and up-to-date, and it has to be available anytime,” shares Barend Raaff, CEO and co-founder at Harver.
Raaff and his associates were aware that as Harver’s customer base expanded to more and more global enterprises, they needed an analytics solution that could scale to provide customers with self-service, real time, actionable insights to improve the quality and efficiency of their hiring processes.
“When we developed our BI suite, we knew that it needed to be equally powerful and flexible as our own product, while providing the same look and feel to our end users.”
—Greg DiTullio, VP Delivery and Customer Success, HarverThe challenge: scaling to meet the demands of enterprise customers
Initially, the Harver team relied on labor-intensive statistical analysis in R or Excel to surface hiring metrics to their customers. However, as Harver continued to grow and add more enterprise customers, it had to automate and scale processes in order to provide their growing customer base the insights and customization they expected.
“When we started focusing on enterprise clients, the problem set was bigger, and candidate volume was much bigger. If you provide a tool that automates processes, you need a way to look at scale. You need an awesome analytics platform that doesn’t rely on manual analysis. You need real-time, dynamic analytics so you can filter, set alerts, and run operational reporting,” says Greg DiTulio, Vice President of Delivery and Customer Success at Harver.
The company needed an analytics solution that could also support its multi-tiered product offering, integrate with other tools such as Zendesk, and support multi-tenancy. In addition to the technical functionality, it was also critical that an embedded solution could appear seamless and natural within the impeccably designed Harver platform. Harver was determined to offer customers powerful, real-time insights, which ran and looked as sleek as the rest of the Harver platform, but they knew their engineering team didn’t have the resources available to build an analytics offering from scratch.
“When we developed our BI suite, we knew that it needed to be equally powerful and flexible as our own product, while providing the same look and feel to our end users,” shares DiTulio.
Powering insights with Looker
After evaluating several tools, the Harver team chose Looker’s embedded analytics offering, Powered by Looker, for its ability to replicate and customize customer-facing reports at scale. Looker’s full API coverage allows Harver and their customers to continue to leverage the latest and greatest capabilities and insights.
With Looker, the Harver team focuses on their customers and product, rather than needing to spend time and resources focused on building and maintaining thousands of custom dashboards. After defining metrics once via Looker’s Git-versioned modeling layer, LookML, Harver can trust that their customers are all looking at accurate metrics, while maintaining the flexibility to efficiently update or customize metric definitions as their customers’ needs change. These updates can be deployed instantly across all customers, saving the Harver team valuable time and ensuring customers insights are fresh and accurate. This allows the Harver team to focus on delivering an exceptional customer experience.
The goal is to bridge common data gaps, while also providing a rich and comprehensive view of their hiring process. As DiTulio adds, “data is most valuable to an organization when it’s married to context from adjacent platforms within your recruitment tech stack.”
With Harver Insights, customers receive out-of-the-box dashboards tracking critical components of the hiring process. This includes operational data (candidate volume, completion rates, device usage), matching (assessment scores, fit scores, personality tests), candidate experience (satisfaction, feedback, sentiment, live comments), and sourcing (hiring rate, satisfaction, segmentation by device).
“Looker has flipped our delivery process. We are taking an analytics approach to focus on the key KPIs that customers want. We can now deliver a beautiful self-service end result.”
—Greg DiTullio, VP Delivery and Customer Success, HarverHarver Insights: making sourcing, operations, and candidate feedback more efficient
Understanding the candidate journey is critical for Harver’s customers. They need to know the source channels—for example LinkedIn, Indeed.com, and others—that bring in the best quality candidates with the highest conversion rates, so they can make decisions on strategy and future investment in those channels. Sourcing insights within the Harver platform also allow talent acquisition leaders to understand trends in conversion rates and to A/B test applicant cohorts to understand additional factors which may impact sourcing efficiency, for example whether a candidate applied via a computer, tablet, or mobile device.
While historical trends are helpful, it’s also become increasingly important that talent acquisition leaders are able to track and adjust to sudden changes in the market, requiring adjustments to previously successful strategies. “Sourcing is extremely expensive. Companies are traditionally focusing their spend and outreach tactics on sources that yielded the highest historical conversion rates. With rapid change in labor markets, firms have realized that historical outcomes are not an effective basis in the new reality,” shares DiTullio.
Talent acquisition leaders also use Harver Insights to optimize the actions their team takes in order to improve recruiting operational efficiencies. For example, one of its large retail customers monitors hiring by location, to determine if each location is meeting sales needs. With this visibility, corporate managers can compare hiring percentage, hiring velocity, rejection rates, and other data to determine efficiencies across locations. This level of analysis and optimization helped the company win an award for recruitment technology.
In addition to helping talent acquisition leaders, the Harver platform also helps recruiters understand the candidate experience so they can help ensure candidates have a realistic preview of the position and that they felt taken care of—and listened to-- throughout the hiring processes. For example, through the “Experience Insights” dashboard, recruitment teams can see, in aggregate and in real-time, what candidates think of their process.
“The candidate's first opportunity to provide feedback should not be after a hiring decision has been made. Businesses need an easy way to keep tabs and be proactive about what candidates have to say about their process,” says DiTullio.
“We partnered with Looker because it has a top-notch solution that enables digital transformation for us and our clients.”
—Greg DiTullio, VP Delivery and Customer Success, HarverHarver Insights: helping organizations respond to global change
Harver customer, NexRep is a virtual workforce company that provides high-performance customer service, sales, and multichannel servers to leading consumer brands. With COVID-19 having such a dramatic impact on both the business and employment landscape, the company experienced an unprecedented influx of people coming to them to look for remote work opportunities. With digital automation processes in place from Harver Insights, NexRep was able to activate 150 agents in just four days to support COVID-19 testing efforts in the State of New York and make remote work opportunities available to thousands of Americans.
“NexRep relies on data and insights to empower decision-making and we could never have handled the volume of candidates that have come to us during COVID-19 without Harver Insights,” said Teddy Liaw, CEO of NexRep. “The actionable insights that Harver Insights provides with Powered by Looker allowed us to assess tens of thousands of candidates within four weeks and deliver the highest quality network of agents in lockstep with client demand.”
Driving product development and adoption with data
In addition to embedding Looker within their own Harver Insights product, the Harver team uses Looker internally to optimize their processes and product development.
“We use Looker to understand utilization of the product, to see what customers are using and are likely to use,” explains DiTullio. Studying visualizations of features in Looker helps us understand which customers use certain modules as well as benchmarking usage to help drive best practices and adoption of features. This helps its engineering teams identify the most useful features and guides the company in developing its product road map. Harver also uses Looker to track the utilization of its product modules so it can anticipate where customer adoption is headed. DiTullio notes that these insights help the company “make sure we have hiring plans in place so we can meet service level agreements (SLAs).”
“We’re doing something that’s not being done anywhere else in the world. We have a product that is the intersection of people science and data science.”
—Greg DiTullio, VP Delivery and Customer Success, HarverPowering digital transformation for a changing recruitment landscape
In addition to saving their engineering team time and resources compared to building reports for customers before using Looker, the Harver team sees the real-time insights they’re providing to customers as key elements to helping talent acquisition leaders reap the benefits of digital transformation. They’ve also seen executives at their largest customers engage most with the Harver Insights tab in their platform, because they see new ways to understand and optimize their business.
“Our most senior customer contacts consume our product through analytics. They don’t look at individual candidate records, but they go into our Insights offering to look at conversion rates, candidate satisfaction, and other factors, because it’s important to them at a programmatic level,” says DiTullio.
“We’re doing something that’s not being done anywhere else in the world. We have a product that is the intersection of people science and data science,” says DiTullio. This places Harver squarely at the forefront of both these fields as they undergo massive change. Harver sees incorporating Looker into its platform as an opportunity to lead the journey for using data to digitally transform in human resources and recruiting. With the trends toward automation and process automation greatly accelerated and rapidly changing, the insights enabled by Looker are critical to helping Harver’s customers achieve digital transformation and, ultimately, efficiency and accuracy in hiring at scale.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Harver
Harver is a cloud-based pre-employment testing solution that helps recruiters manage processes for assessing candidates by collecting relevant data and ranking applicants according to available job roles.