Meet 99designs by Vista:

99designs by Vista is a global creative platform that enables clients and designers to create and collaborate on designs they love. As part of the Vista family, they help small businesses thrive with expert design that makes brands unforgettable.

The Catalyst: Post-Acquisition Scaling

In October 2020, 99designs was acquired by Vistaprint, creating a need to evolve for 20 million new global customers. Without an internal talent acquisition team, they sought an embedded recruitment partner to triple the size of their product delivery team.

Key objectives:

• Establish scalable recruitment functions and operations.
• Co-design global recruitment processes, train hiring managers, and improve equitable hiring practices.
• Develop Employer Value Proposition and Employer Branding.
• Create talent attraction strategies for competitive markets.
• Maintain start-up culture while scaling.
• Increase the representation of women engineers.
• Introduce measurable recruitment metrics.

The Challenges: Grow fast. Stay authentic. Build equitably

99designs had a small team in Oakland, Berlin and Melbourne, and their People & Culture function was still being established.

affix was charged with helping the product delivery teams ‘spin up’ new squads over an 18 month period which included roles in product, engineering, design, and an additional focus on attracting women engineers at all levels of seniority, and ensuring the integrity of the culture was maintained while scaling.

The Solution: An embedded approach that could flex

99designs had a small team in Oakland, Berlin and Melbourne, and their People & Culture function was still being established.

affix was charged with helping the product delivery teams ‘spin up’ new squads over an 18 month period which included roles in product, engineering, design, and an additional focus on attracting women engineers at all levels of seniority, and ensuring the integrity of the culture was maintained while scaling.

The Highlight: Engineering recruitment for greater representation

affix’s brief was to increase the representation of women engineers in the team, from junior software engineers to senior leaders. affix co-designed equitable recruitment processes with 99designs and also partnered with Code Like a Girl and Le Wagon to hire aspiring intern software engineers.

The Results: Outcomes to be proud of

• Hired 100+ individuals in <18 months – Tripled the growth of product delivery teams across engineering, security, product, design, data, marketing, community support roles and more.
• 40% women in engineering – Hired 45 software engineers, with 40% women representation, including 4 women in leadership roles.
• Talent Architecture – Created 99designs’ entire internal recruitment capability with scalable, cohesive hiring systems.
• Data-driven insights – Provided comprehensive analytics that transformed hiring decisions, including brand awareness metrics, NPS scores, sourcing channel effectiveness, time-to-fill optimisation, and competitive salary intelligence.
• Creative, compelling campaigns – Translated 99designs’ culture into a compelling employer brand & narrative, launching strategic campaigns that attracted exceptional talent and establishing 99designs as an employer of choice.

 

 

 

Every company’s hiring journey is unique.

Whether you’re building your talent function from scratch, scaling fast, or driving meaningful progress on diversity — we embed as part of your team and treat every hire like it’s our own, for the time you need us.

And because every candidate interaction reflects your employer brand, we deliver an exceptional, values-aligned experience at every stage — whether someone gets the role or not.

Curious to learn what’s possible for your stage of growth?

Reach out to our Founder & CEO, Jarrad Skeen or drop us a line here.