Actionable Insights Help Backstage Connect the Right Talent to the Right Opportunity

Insights/Action/Outcome: Job applications feed Backstage’s growth loop by satisfying the talent platform’s two core user groups. Initially, Backstage buried its iOS app on the website, assuming it would not impact job applications, but Analytics showed this assumption to be false: Talent users on the iOS app applied to jobs at a higher rate than other users. After surfacing the app on the web, Backstage saw a significant increase in iOS users and a 40% increase in applications among those who downloaded the app.

Brick-and-mortar businesses used to rely on in-store observations to see how customers interacted with products. Today, web-based businesses can see aggregated customer data in real time—and if it’s handled right, that data can impact operations and power growth.

Backstage is a platform where people find job opportunities and creative talent—from actors to models to crew—all in one place. We’re a two-sided marketplace. On one side, we have one of the largest talent databases, which employers can quickly and easily browse to find the best talent available. Unlike some employers, creators have hard production deadlines, and efficiency saves money. On the other side, we have a broad pool of talent who are searching for opportunities. We must understand who our users are and meet their needs in different ways, because what a crew member looks for in our platform may be different from what an actor wants.

I started working with Amplitude when I joined Backstage a few years ago as the Senior Manager of Business Intelligence. At Backstage, we leverage Amplitude Analytics to understand how all our users move around our site. We also parse our users to different cohorts, determine what each of those cohorts needs, and create ways to serve them better.

A platform that adds value to all business units

The cross-functional nature of Analytics makes it easy for me to enable our business leaders and all of our business units to get the insights they need. Analytics offers a lot of out-of-the-box functionality, so once I help someone understand what analytics they want, they can quickly get to the specific user insights relevant to them. That quick time to value helps everyone: our marketing team, who uses the platform to understand how their campaigns perform; our customer development team, who uses the platform to identify user challenges; our product team, who uses the platform to shape future product growth; and everyone in between.

Analytics is much easier than any other analytics tool I’ve used. Once you set people up with a few charts, the insights really take off because the platform makes data so easy to understand. Funnel charts are especially beneficial. It’s easy to select the events we want to see in sequence and understand conversion or drop-off rates throughout that funnel.

Backstage is a global company that has acquired seven other brands. We recently started integrating all our brands into Analytics, giving us the flexibility to drill down into each brand’s performance while also being able to roll up all that data and see the high-level key performance metrics for any brand. Business leaders can view any project at any time, see the conversion metrics, and understand its overall impact on the company—giving them the insights they need to make better strategic decisions.

Taking action to increase applications by 40%

Backstage’s business growth rests on our ability to quickly connect the right talent to the right job opportunities. Employers need applications, and talent needs job opportunities. Applications fuel that growth loop, as employers who successfully find talent through Backstage will post more opportunities, and talent who have previous success landing work through us will apply again.

A big turning point for us was noticing that our subscribers who downloaded the iOS app applied for jobs at a higher rate. Initially, we didn’t promote our iOS app. It lived (somewhat buried) on our site based on our expectation that the app wouldn’t impact the number of applications people submitted. We saw data in Analytics that proved us wrong: iOS app users were more engaged with our product, applying to more jobs faster than other users.

We responded to that insight by surfacing the app on the web. We added a big “download our app” banner after the web checkout flow and a native banner for mobile users browsing our site. As a result of these changes, we saw a significant increase in iOS users and a 40% increase in applications among those users after they downloaded the app. We fed our growth loop as more employers received more applications they needed, and more talent users discovered jobs relevant to them. Satisfying both user groups helps grow our business over time.

New features that add value and bring visibility to data

The Amplitude team regularly releases new features to help us get more out of our data. One of the most exciting new features is Audiences, which allows our marketing team to analyze and act on the data they see. When the marketing team identifies a cohort in Analytics that they want to grow or nurture, they can migrate that cohort data to HubSpot with a couple of clicks. From there, they can set up engagement campaigns and target specific messages to users based on the user type or where they are in their customer journey. A good example would be a cohort of crew members interested in one job who would likely be interested in a new opportunity just posted on the platform. Syncing data with our MarTech stack makes it actionable—and a lot more valuable.

Without Analytics, we would need a developer team to create individual engagement campaigns, and marketing team members couldn’t track those campaigns in real-time. I’d also need a massive team of data scientists to build funnels for everyone at Backstage, which is just not feasible.

As the person responsible for business intelligence across all teams and brands, I use Amplitude’s data governance tool to manage a large amount of data and translate that into something the business can use. We have a lot of different developer teams at Backstage, which means we have a lot of new events. When your business takes action based on data insights, it’s crucial to understand what that data is and where it’s coming from. Amplitude’s data governance feature makes it easy for me to see the data coming in from our different sources and define it in consistent ways that I know will be valuable to our business.

I’ve tried to achieve this independently with SQL code, but I could never reach this granularity, and it took a lot of effort. To have such visibility into data on such a large scale, in real time, and on a user-friendly platform? It’s impressive.

Amplitude offers a new dimension to our data. We can see how customers interact with our product in real-time, and grow Backstage by actioning user data in ways we couldn’t before.

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