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. It has brought more than one million creative projects to life since 2008, and as part of the Vista family, it helps small businesses thrive with expert design.

The Catalyst: Lofty goals, global scale

In October 2020, 99designs was acquired by Vistaprint, leading to a need for the platform to evolve and connect with the broader Vistaprint organisation to create greater design outcomes for their new 20 million global customers. At the time, 99designs did not have an internal recruitment team and all hiring managers had been managing their own recruitment local to their region. With the enormous task at hand, 99designs sought a recruitment partner to help them attract talent in a more coordinated way and maintain their culture while they scaled.

The Challenges: A recruitment Rubik’s cube

99designs had circa 120 employees across three hubs in Oakland, Berlin and Melbourne. At the time, the company’s HR/People Operations function was still in its infancy so they wanted a recruitment partner to help them solve their recruitment Rubik’s cube. The challenges were many, which affix welcomed with curiosity and open arms. affix was tasked with helping the product delivery teams triple in size over an 18 month period (December 2020-June 2022) across product, engineering, design, marketing and more, with a specific focus on attracting engineering women in leadership and across all levels of seniority to increase representation, all while ensuring the integrity of the culture was maintained while scaling. 

“We were going through a period of huge growth, and that meant we needed to find a lot of new talent… great talent! Working with affix was like nothing I’ve experienced with a recruitment team before, they really got to know our business and culture and became an extension of our team. The affix team worked closely with our hiring managers to really understand what was needed from each role and were there through each stage of the process. They were not only able to find fantastic talent, but in very high volumes which isn’t easy.”

Bee, former Sr Director of People and Community

The Solution: An embedded approach and an agile environment

To support 99designs in the timing and sequencing of hiring talented individuals in the right roles at the right time, affix needed to understand how 99designs’ agile teams worked together and contributed to their North Star at a ‘group’ and ‘squad’ level. Having in-depth knowledge of their product delivery organisation enabled affix to hire talented individuals in a cohesive and seamless way across their agile teams.

We had a dedicated national team of embedded recruitment specialists who were experts in their respective field and had an in-depth understanding of 99designs’ unique needs and culture. This team was able to manage recruitment, co-design recruitment processes with 99designs, collaborate effectively with hiring managers, and maintain high standards of quality and consistency in the recruitment process.

But the real beauty in the approach was affix’s ability to flex up the size of the recruitment team as needed, by partnering with the broader affix team to hire for specialist roles or manage spikes in recruitment. This meant hiring managers and candidates received the same great experience regardless of which member of affix was collaborating with them.

Another key pillar to our approach was providing the best CX (customer experience) we possibly could to everyone we connected with, from hiring managers to potential employees. In fact, it was a non-negotiable. For hiring managers, we took the time to understand their vision, strategy, and impact, and provided market and brand insights, as well as candidate feedback, in a transparent and honest way. For candidates, we took the time to know them well beyond their CV, kept them in the loop throughout the application process and iterated on their candidate experience by surveying them along the way.

“Working with affix was unlike any other recruitment partnership. Not only did they go out of their way to understand our engineering and company culture –  they became a part of it. Together we truly embraced continuous iteration and experimentation in our recruitment process, similar to how we approach product development at 99designs. It’s hard to imagine us reaching the growth and diversity outcomes that we did without affix’s willingness and ability to be agile, creative and to learn with us along the way.”

Tom, Head of Engineering

The Highlight: Engineering recruitment for greater representation

affix had the mandate to increase the representation of women engineers in the team, with a particular focus on increasing the number of women in engineering leadership positions.  affix co-designed recruitment processes with 99designs based on research, our previous experience recruiting for greater representation, and feedback from women software engineers in the business as well as in the market.

To 99designs and affix, the marker of a great engineer wasn’t narrowly focussed on their tech stack, but rather the quality of their engineering principles, practices, ways of working, system design and architecture. This holistic approach helped increase the number of qualified candidates, and therefore the number of women engineers, while never lowering the standard of what makes an exceptional engineer. affix also ensured code tests were “blind”/non-identifiable to reduce biases, which enabled us to hire better engineers irrespective of gender. We also partnered with Code Like a Girl and Le Wagon to hire aspiring intern software engineers/future leaders of the 45 software engineers hired, 40 % were women, and 4 were women in leadership positions.

The Learnings: A lesson in hiring women engineers

Throughout the process we were reminded that it’s not enough to hire women engineers. If a business doesn’t have an existing culture that is equitable and inclusive underpinned by systems, practices, and processes that enable diversity and inclusion to flourish, then this will never be a successful long-term strategy. Luckily, 99designs knew this was the case and had an established and enabled inclusive culture that was backed by existing and new employees.

The Result: Scaled to succeed

Working with 99designs, affix was able to help them scale their product development function by tripling their team size  in just 18 months. By deeply understanding their agile product environment, affix was able to support them in the timing and sequencing of hiring talented people in the right roles at the right time. This was particularly challenging in engineering, where they had a mandate to increase the representation of women engineers in the team, including in leadership positions. Through co-designing recruitment processes with 99designs, affix was able to successfully increase the representation of women in engineering positions. Throughout the process, amazing customer experience was the cornerstone of everything affix  did, ensuring every person we connected with was delighted by the experience.

Overall, the partnership between 99designs and affix was a great success, helping 99designs expand their product development function in a very competitive market and integrate with Vistaprint while maintaining their culture and values.

The Breakdown: Outcomes to be proud of

• Tripled product delivery teams in less than 18 months across software engineering, security, product, design, data, marketing and community support roles.
• Increased the representation of women engineers to the team, with 40% of the 45 software engineers hired being women, and 4 women hired in leadership positions.
• Built the 99designs internal talent acquisition function from the ground up enabling them to have robust, streamlined and cohesive hiring systems, practices and processes moving forward.
• Provided insights to 99d leadership including stats on brand awareness, candidate and hiring manager NPS, candidate source, time-to-fill data, real-time salary and market data, percentage of offers declined and more.
• Executed custom branded marketing campaigns (paid and organic) that shifted and evolved with different needs.