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Customer Story / Upwork

Customer Story - UpWork
Customer Story Upwork
Upwork
  • 17 Million Users
  • 180 Countries
  • Voted 2020 Top Places to Work in the San Francisco-Bay Area
  • Voted 2019 Healthiest Employer

Upwork, the largest global freelancing website offers enterprises reliable access to a pool of quality talent.  With millions of jobs posted on Upwork annually, freelancers are earning money by providing companies with over 8,000 skills across more than 70 categories of work.

In order to support their community of freelancers, their team, their customers and their platform, Upwork turned to Crosschq’s automated referencing and talent sourcing solution to help them hire and retain the best talent. 

While Crosschq expedited Upwork’s already existing hiring process, a bit of magic happened when they decided to do candidate reference checks before they brought in finalists for in-person interviews. 

335 Hours Saved

Time saved by HR & recruiting teams on sourcing reference data by moving from a manual process to Crosschq.

80 Hires in 71 Days

An entire sales staff was successfully sourced & hired in under 3 months to open a new regional office with Crosschq.

$2,500,000 Saved

Cost of employment by reducing non-regrettable attrition by 5 full-time employees through the use of Crosschq.

Crosschq gathers direct insights from people,
for people and transforms those insights into powerfully predictive data that helps us ensure a great job match.
up
Dan Collins
Director of Talent Acquisition, Upwork

The Goal:

Exponential Hiring In A Short Time Frame

Upwork is invested in sourcing and retaining the best candidates for their business, assessing both role and culture match.  To open a new regional sales office, they needed to staff an entire sales team from scratch in 3 months.  More than that, the new team needed to be up and running, generating leads and hitting sales quotas from day 1.

The Challenge

Ineffective Screening & Sourcing

Upwork had a well-established hiring process, but the hiring team was spending too much time interviewing under-qualified candidates.  They needed a way to screen-in the best of the best. And because they needed a large volume of roles filled quickly, they weren’t able to find enough quality, available candidates fast enough to meet demand through their traditional sourcing tools.

The Solution

Reference Checks Before In-Person Interview

Upwork was already using Crosschq for reference checking and talent sourcing. But to further distill their candidate pool, they did their candidate reference checks BEFORE their in-person interviews.  This was a game changer.  Not only did Crosschq’s Human Intelligence Platform provide insights that filtered out candidates that weren’t an ideal match, but the data made the interviews much more robust and impactful.  Furthermore, through Crosschq’s reference opt-in feature, they were able to turn references into qualified active candidates for their other open roles.  Time was better spent, desired outcomes were achieved and a new, streamlined hiring process was established at Upwork.

Intended & Unintended Benefits

Diversity & Inclusion

32% of hires came from under-represented groups

Offer Conversion

Interview to offer
conversion up 84%

High Performers

60% improvement in
employee performance

Improved Retention

55% reduction in 60-day
new hire turnover