Summary

When Canva needed to supercharge sourcing for hard-to-find skillsets and their most complex roles, they turned to Solve. In six months, we delivered 46 hires across critical engineering capability — outperforming key hiring benchmarks while operating within a deliberately rigorous, multi-stage process. This led to our partnership being extended twice.

About Canva

Canva is one of the world’s most successful technology platforms, known for its product innovation, rapid global growth and strong employer brand. With a compelling EVP and high visibility in the tech market, Canva attracts significant inbound interest and, as a result, manages extremely high application volumes.

The challenge

Canva requires highly specialised, senior-level engineering experts in areas where traditional advertising avenues would not surface the right candidates with the speed they require.

These are complex, high-impact roles demanding deep technical capability, and the right candidates are rarely active job seekers.

Operating under a purely outbound brief, we were tasked to reach the corners of the market that others can’t access and engaged exceptional engineering talent who are usually not in the market for a new role.

The solution

We deployed our Embedded model, integrating a dedicated team directly into Canva’s hiring ecosystem.

Operating seamlessly alongside Canva’s internal stakeholders, our consultants represented Canva in-market, engaging candidates as an extension of the brand while leveraging Solve’s full technology stack, network and resources.

Working under an outbound-focused sourcing strategy with no access to inbound applicants or existing talent pools, our approach combined precision market intelligence with advanced technology to identify and engage high-calibre passive talent.

We:

• Conducted deep technical market mapping
• Leveraged proprietary talent networks
• Used advanced AI candidate search tools
• Analysed candidate activity across GitHub, Stack Overflow, and engineering communities
• Built hyper-personalised engagement grounded in each engineer’s real technical contributions

Our AI-enabled approach allows us to identify and engage candidates with demonstrated proven capability in specific frameworks, platforms and codebases.

By combining Canva’s brand strength with Solve’s sourcing infrastructure and technology, our tailored and highly targeted outreach drove strong engagement with passive, high-calibre engineers.

The result

Across our initial six-month engagement:

• 46 senior tech hires
• Reduced time-to-hire by 13%
• 94% offer acceptance rate
• Outperformed target interview-to-hire ratio by50%
• 96% of hires from outbound sourcing

Since the initial engagement, the partnership has been extended twice and is a clear endorsement of the value delivered through Solve’s Embedded outbound model in unlocking hard-to-access engineering talent at speed.

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