Case Study: Silicon Labs

Growing tech company needs to establish employer brand

Silicon Labs is an Austin, Texas based tech company that produces semiconductors and software for wireless technologies commonly used in the growing the “Internet of Things.” Their wireless products appear in places like smart devices, smart homes, smart cities, electric vehicles, and more. Antonio Busalacchi is the Head of TA at Silicon Labs and had the vision of a larger global organization. They compete with some of the largest tech companies in the world including Intel and AMD. Facing this type of competition has meant that Silicon Labs needed to be strategic, smart, and efficient in their recruiting and employer brand building efforts.

“When I first joined the team, we were hiring around 100-200 employees per year, and they were predominantly here in the U.S. Now, we’re hiring anywhere from 300-500 employees per year, and more than 60-70% of those are outside of the United States,” said Antonio.

Recent years have brought growth to Silicon Labs resulting in the need for increased hiring. Silicon Labs adopted Jobvite Talent Acquisition Suite with Career Sites as a hub for candidates and to analyze traffic in their areas of growth. The data provided by Jobvite Career Sites offered insight into who was interacting with their site, content, and applying to jobs, where they were located. This information allowed Silicon Labs to create a content campaign promoting their employer brand. It featured employee stories as well as international features of employees posted across social channels. Tracking career site data before and after this campaign provided valuable insights into the effectiveness of their first recruitment marketing effort. “Over the years we have been able to drive our applications up 3x from where they were previously,” said Antonio.

As the recruitment marketing efforts progressed, Silicon Labs identified the need for additional help on their talent acquisition team. Competitors had the hiring advantage of an established global brand, but Silicon Labs knew their culture could give them an edge. When he joined, Busalacchi inherited a small but efficient talent acquisition team at Silicon Labs. He then added to his team and built an effective TA operation in North America. Antonio knew he needed a strong business case for more staff to support the company’s global growth targets. He decided to implement Jobvite’s comprehensive Talent Acquisition Suite consisting of the Applicant Tracking System (ATS), CRM and Career Sites to work together to build his team.

Using the data gathered from their Jobvite solution, Antonio was able to make a compelling case for a significant increase in recruiters with an emphasis on a global TA team. Using data points like average time-to-fill and average hires-per-recruiter, the Silicon Labs executive team saw that the only way they could reach their hiring goals was to increase the size of the TA team. This valuable data accessed through Jobvite helped Antonio secure funding needed at the right time to be successful in his hiring plan. “We ended up hiring 120% of our plan, which allowed us to really drive growth going into 2021,” said Antonio.

In-depth reporting for flexible recruiting

Jobvite Advanced Analytics provides Silicon Labs visibility in career site activity as well as measure the success of their recruitment marketing campaigns. Accurate reporting allows the organization to project hiring numbers for the year and make sure they are hiring enough employees to meet business objectives. If they find they are not hiring enough, they are able to ramp up to quickly meet the required numbers. Weekly reports allow the TA team to inform executives on recruiting activity cross-referenced with the company’s needs, allowing for agility in their recruiting efforts.

The data also helps highlight recruiting work to the executive team as well as keep them on track for meeting business objectives. With the benefit of their partnership with Jobvite, Silicon Labs has been able to achieve their hiring goals each year since 2018. Jobvite has consistently provided Silicon Labs with the real-time data that they need to make the decisions and execute the strategies required to expand the business.

About Silicon Labs

“We are a family of hardware and software engineers and innovators dedicated to solving our customers’ toughest IoT wireless embedded design challenges with breakthrough connected solutions. We make it easy for engineers and designers to create the next generation of devices that push the limits of possibility. With unmatched simplicity, performance, security and reliability, we help them get to market faster by giving them the tools and support they need to maintain their competitive edge.” – silabs.com/about-us/brand-promise