Canva schedules interviews 84% faster with GoodTime

87%

reduction in monthly interview reschedules

84%

faster interview scheduling process

50%

fewer scheduling tools required

Industry

Technology

Location

Sydney, Australia

Company Size

5,000 - 10,000

ATS

How it started: Finding people with a shared vision

Canva’s goal is to empower the world to design — helping students, not-for-profits, and enterprise organizations create presentations, social media posts, print products, flyers, or anything in between.

Empowering the world requires a skilled team, and Canva is always on the lookout for top talent who shares the company’s vision.

“We want to hire the best people in the world because we are building what we hope is the best product in the world. Choosing the technology to help us do that isn’t something we take lightly,” said Carissa Spencer, Global Talent Acquisition Enablement & Operations Lead at Canva.  

It’s not uncommon for Canva to perform as many as 2,400 interviews per month. Maintaining this level of activity required the team to find a better way to meet its efficiency and automation goals.

Refining a global talent acquisition strategy

Canva is constantly hiring and sees a high volume of candidates for customer service roles and early talent areas like their grads and intern programs. The most significant volume of effort sits within engineering teams and the associated technical interviews for those roles. Regardless of the role or location, Canva wants to create a personalized, world-class experience for everyone. That doesn’t just mean candidates, but interviewers, hiring managers, and recruiters—anyone who participates in the hiring process.

“We have about 40 recruiters on the team and quite a comprehensive tech stack,” Carissa said. “We’re really focused on creating a seamless ecosystem that suits all of our end users’ needs.”

Canva wanted to boost automation, as their manual workflow—involving juggling calendars, Slack channels, emails, and phone calls—increased the risk of human error and significantly slowed the hiring process. 

“We operated with a ton of manual work. This meant sending G-Cal or Outlook invites, sending comments from a separate platform, trolling through calendars, and rescheduling meetings, which is challenging at the best of times,” explained Stephanie Toner, Global Recruitment Coordinator Lead at Canva. 

“There was no automation whatsoever and it was just a huge amount of manual intervention for everyone on our team,” Carissa added.

The search was on for a modern software solution that offered scalability, flexibility, and a uniquely human touch that could showcase Canva’s employer brand.

Building a recruitment culture with innovative, human-centric AI

Canva’s strategic priorities focus on three key areas:

  • Automation and AI
  • Consistent experiences for candidates and interviewers
  • A seamless tech ecosystem
“To accomplish these things, we need to have a best-in-breed tech stack,” Carissa said.

The best option for Canva was GoodTime, which promised to help them meet their strategic objectives. GoodTime’s AI-powered platform offered opportunities to increase automation and efficiency with optimized scheduling and insights to reduce repetitive and tedious work.

Canva staff, also known as Canvanauts, have since leveraged GoodTime to build a robust interview process that’s faster, more seamless, and more personalized for candidates—and their internal hiring team.

“Canva has one of the strongest recruitment cultures that I’ve seen across any of the organizations that I’ve worked for,” Carissa said. “Recruiting is everyone’s job. The people we hire build the product, and we have a very high investment in the employees that we hire for that reason.”

Around 40% of Canvanauts play a role within the interviewing and hiring process. Of that 40%, 70% of those are interviewers who consistently use GoodTime.

“GoodTime helps us pick mutually convenient times for both candidate and interviewer to meet,” Carissa said. “We also have access to interviewer training pathways, which is a really key part of bringing new interviewers into our interviewing community.”

Increased efficiency and flexibility improves the hiring experience — on both sides

Some hiring metrics can be hard to pinpoint, but Canva has seen tangible impacts since implementing GoodTime.

“Our recruitment process used to require 80 or more steps,” Stephanie said. “With GoodTime, we’ve managed to reduce these steps by 84%.”

Another process improvement: fewer rescheduled interviews. Since Canva’s AI-enhanced scheduling process is now quick, convenient, automated, and personalized, there are fewer scheduling conflicts (and fewer headaches required to reschedule). In April 2024, the team used GoodTime as part of an initiative to increase recruiter and interviewer buy-in to the recruiting process. They noticed a steep decrease — more than 87% —  in their reschedule rate, which they attributed to the success of this initiative.

“GoodTime’s transformed our candidate and interviewer experience by allowing us to tailor our interview journey process,” Stephanie said. And candidates’ lives have also been simplified through their candidate portal. Applicants can book an interview time that works best for them, and have their own dashboard where they can see the interview time and name of their interviewer. They can also easily reschedule if something comes up. This increased agency helps put the candidate in the driver’s seat and gives them an interview experience they won’t get at most other places. 

A partnership that transforms hiring

Partnering with GoodTime was a big step in creating a best-in-class tech stack. Canva cut the number of interview scheduling tools by 50% while maintaining a seamless integration with their ATS, SmartRecruiters. This consolidation further streamlines their workflows and enables Canvanauts to optimize higher-value solutions.

“We have such a high bar, and we need to make sure that process is seamless for our interviewers,” Carissa explained. “That includes having information at their fingertips so they don’t have to jump from system to system to locate the information they need. They can do that with GoodTime’s Interviewer Portal.”

For Canva’s hiring team, adopting GoodTime has been critical to elevating their hiring experience and finding more people who share the same passion and drive for creativity.

“We would not be able to do the job that we do without using GoodTime and leveraging the phenomenal support that we have from the GoodTime team,” Carissa said.

Where we landed

87%

reduction in monthly interview reschedules

84%

faster interview scheduling process

50%

fewer scheduling tools required

AI for more human hiring.

Join hundreds of world-leading companies that have automated 90% of interview management tasks with human-centric AI.