How Wistia Saves Time and Money on People Ops with ChartHop

ChartHop has helped Wistia

• Bring transparency and clarity to the hiring plan for all stakeholders
• Use people data to gather insights and make impactful decisions to benefit the team
• Strengthen alignment between People and Finance for more accurate forecasting

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Taylor Roa is the Director of Talent and Culture at Wistia and was brought on to build out and lead the Talent function with DEI at the core of their hiring strategy. To be most impactful, Taylor sought out a People Operations Platform to consolidate headcount planning, align with Finance, and eliminate manual tasks—all in one place.

The Challenge: Time is Money

In a pre-pandemic world, Wistia realized that their people data systems and headcount planning process left much to be desired. While the People team had access to information that lived in their HRIS and ATS, business partners and employees across the organization didn’t have that same visibility because the data was siloed.

In the absence of a centralized place to collaborate, the People team had to resort to sending out separate spreadsheets for each department head to submit proposed headcount changes.

Historically, Taylor and his team were converting fields manually so that information matched across departments, and could then be pulled into a master hiring plan for the entire organization. This process was inefficient and almost impossible to keep organized, resulting in variations to the overall plan that lived in different places.

Not only was this a painful and time-consuming process for the People team, but it impeded effective collaboration with Finance. Without access to an alignedhiring plan, Finance was left to estimate target salaries and use placeholder start dates in an effort to forecast the budget.

Now Wistia can

• Reclaim 8-10 hours per week previously spent on manual data pulls across systems
• Replace need for a dedicated HRIS analyst, amounting to cost savings of $90k/year
• Get more value out of their ATS and HRIS with a unified people operations platform

The Solution: A Unified People Ops Platform

Spurred on by a big hiring year in 2022, the Wistia People team had an immediate need to connect their various people tools and remove manual updates for forecasting headcount. This led them to look for a unified people operations platform where all business partners and stakeholders across People and Finance had access to the people data needed to make informed decisions, collaborate on headcount plans, and take action to achieve business goals.

Implementing ChartHop allowed them to do all of that while navigating a changing macro-economic landscape.

In a past era at Wistia, recruiters were responsible for creating their own draft roles in the ATS and managing all the associated details, such as anticipated start date, target salary, etc. The lack of standardization resulted in a lot of variance and data inputs for each open requisition and made it hard to track progress and budget against the overall hiring plan.

Explaining the impact, Taylor shares: “When we switched on ChartHop for the whole organization, suddenly everyone could see our hiring plan with anticipated start dates as well as which recruiter and hiring manager was working on each requisition. And this transparency solved so many pain points for our team and it made folks really prepared to plan ahead as the company grew.”

Today, with ChartHop, the process is much more streamlined and simplified, saving Taylor and his team time spent on manual tasks. Once all stakeholders decide on the headcount plan and a job is approved, Taylor simply clicks ‘Active’ in ChartHop. Next, through a direct sync, the headcount data pushes into Wistia’s ATS with the same template every single time. That’s it. With just one click, there’s consistency across all open roles and everyone has confidence that each requisition that’s opened matches what Finance approved, saving the Recruiting team hours spent on manual tasks.

The Results: The ROI of Connected Tools

Just how much time was Wistia’s People team able to save? Taylor reports a collective team average of up to 8-10 hours per week saved by eliminating manual data pulls from different systems, consolidating spreadsheets for headcount plans, and building reports.

Taylor elaborates, “The manual changes to a headcount plan for Finance and budget purposes actually takes way more time than you will ever imagine. If you think about every promotion, every raise, every hire, and every departure for a company that’s over 200 employees, that becomes a huge time suck to manually keep track of.”

And gone are the days when the People team manually exported data from HR systems to compile into spreadsheets, reformat with matching fields, and use VLookups and complicated formulas to run comparisons across tools.

By bringing all of their people data into ChartHop, the team is now able to quickly and easily find trends, such as departure signals by gender, ethnicity, department, and tenure, to implement impactful processes and initiatives. Having these insights at their fingertips has replaced Wistia’s need for a dedicated HR analyst, amounting to cost savings of$90k/year based on the national average for total compensation.

Wistia’s Conclusion: Unlocking People Ops Superpowers

Turning people data into actionable insights, ChartHop allows Wistia’s People team to tell the story of their people and align to business goals.

Taylor concludes: “Having these insights in ChartHop, the biggest thing is it helps us tell a story around our priorities. I think a lot of times the People team knows what needs to be done, but a business is building products.

Sometimes it can be hard for People teams to make the case to prioritize what’s important for the business from their perspective, and the best way to do that is to tell a story with data. So that’s definitely been a super power for us since we onboarded with ChartHop.”