Jobandtalent is a world-leading digital temp staffing marketplace that connects job seekers with job opportunities and streamlines the hiring process for employers. What sets Jobandtalent apart from other job portals is their innovative use of technology and data-driven approach to recruitment.

The platform uses machine learning algorithms to match job seekers with suitable job openings, while also providing employers with a range of tools to help them manage their recruitment process efficiently. With over 3,000 employees, operating in 11 countries, Jobandtalent helps more than 2,500 companies and over 340,000 workers streamline temporary role placement in 2022.

Challenges

Jobandtalent prides itself on being a data-driven company. And the centerpiece is its data team, led by Vice President of Analytics Rowan Jacobson.

“We provide insights and reporting across the product and just generally across the rest of the organization,” Jacobson said. “We work with our marketplace team and our product team, but also functions like HR, finance, marketing and revenue operations.”

With thousands of employees across different departments, demands on the data team’s time were high.

“We've grown quite quickly over the last two-to-three years,” Jacobson said. “But the data team didn't expand as quickly as the rest of the organization. Our smaller team was just trying to answer all the questions, but there were more and more demands.”

Initially Jobandtalent’s data team tried to set up scheduled queries within Redash to help different stakeholders with recurring reporting, but found that it was significantly impacting the performance of its data warehouse, Redshift.

“Too many queries block up the processing power of Redshift,” Jacobson said. “It's not so easy to expand. So what you have is a lot of queries taking up a lot of capacity. And some queries timed out.”

Team resources were wasted on constantly trying to fix blockages and identity which queries were causing issues. Meanwhile, warehouse performance was degrading.

When Redash announced that they were sunsetting, Jobandtalent set out to find a solution that would not only provide a seamless migration, but would also solve the issues around collaboration, self-service, SQL governance, and warehouse performance.

Solutions

PopSQL’s scheduled queries feature — which allows users to schedule reports to refresh on a recurring basis and automatically be delivered via Slack and email — satisfied all of Jobandtalent’s needs around automation and improved self-service.

“Scheduled queries have been extremely important for us,” Jacobson said. “People need queries all the time. They need the data all the time. So by adding scheduling, you let them get on with their lives.”

Even better was PopSQL’s willingness to enhance the feature to align with the company’s requirements, according to Data Product Manager José Gabriel Martínez.

“There was an approval flow that we needed to give us more governance over the data being accessed, and PopSQL was very open to adding that to the product roadmap,” Martínez said.

Jacobson agreed. “PopSQL’s team has been very proactive in improving the product and working with our team, which you don't find very much,” Jacobson said.

But what sealed the deal was the options PopSQL provided in terms of connecting to Jobandtalent’s database thus allowing them to unify all their data into a centralized tool unlike other solutions on the market, PopSQL allowed Jobandtalent to avoid self-hosting in favor of hosting everything in the cloud. That, along with PopSQL’s roadmap for built-in dbt Core™ support — which enables users to create dbt macros and models within the SQL editor — proved that PopSQL was ideal for supporting the company’s long-term vision of creating efficient and effective data marts for different business lines. This allows for increased insight through and ultimately fast data discovery.

“Many business teams, such as Finance, now use PopSQL to get the data they need fast,” Jacobson said. “They’ll write a query to get what they need, ask us to go over the SQL and make sure it’s correct, and then it can be scheduled on a regular basis. The data can also be extracted directly into Excel which most users want to use.”

Results

PopSQL not only helps Jobandtalent increase insight throughput across its organization, it also saves its data team precious time.

Martínez used to have to run a cleaning process through the company’s scheduled queries on a regular basis in an attempt to keep things organized and get rid of any unnecessary or inaccurate queries. By providing a monitoring and approval system, they can now make business decisions quickly and with the right data

“Things were getting out of hand,” Martínez said. “We were sorting through all these queries every two or three months, because they would slow down performance for everyone else. And it would take weeks to sort through all the schedules and if we still needed it. We needed a system of notification — a way of monitoring.”

Thanks to PopSQL, governance of queries and schedules are now automated.

“We had people spending a lot of time on that,” Jacobson said. “They don’t spend any time on it now.”

Additionally, with PopSQL’s search functionality, data team members can quickly search across the curated tables, columns, shared queries, and more to make sure they’re querying the right data. That, plus helpful features like smart autocomplete, help the team improve the accuracy of results and build a culture of data trust.

But arguably the greatest proof of PopSQL’s value to Jobandtalent is how integral it’s become to so many different people’s workflows. Thus, reducing collaboration overhead and enabling better self-service. 

“What's valuable is being data-driven,” Jacobson said. “ PopSQL enables us to be much more than that. It allows people to get on with their jobs and get data when they need it, while also freeing up our own data team’s time to work on more strategic insights and projects.”