The Challenge
Scaling a global Talent Acquisition function is never simple — especially when hiring spans multiple markets, disciplines, and time zones.
As Groupon expanded its operations across the US, EMEA, and APAC, its Global TA team faced increasing complexity:
- Multiple open roles across new and existing locations
- A mix of technical and non-technical hiring needs
- New recruiters ramping up on unfamiliar markets
- Pressure to accelerate time-to-hire while maintaining quality
For a business built on connecting people and experiences, attracting and enabling the right talent was critical to sustaining growth in a highly competitive e-commerce landscape.
The Partnership
To meet these challenges, Groupon partnered with TA.guru to build the infrastructure, knowledge, and insights needed to scale hiring effectively across regions.
The engagement combined several key components:
- Recruiter Playbooks — bespoke, data-driven knowledge assets capturing best practices, role intelligence, and local hiring insights for key functions.
- Top-of-funnel sourcing support — targeted research and candidate sourcing across multiple roles and geographies to fuel immediate pipeline growth.
- Dynamic market intelligence — ongoing updates on talent availability, compensation trends, and competitive movements, helping recruiters and hiring managers make faster, better-informed decisions.
- Candidate outreach guidance — support with messaging strategies and engagement templates to improve response rates and elevate candidate experience.
- Recruiter support desk — a live advisory function for day-to-day recruiter questions, ensuring consistent support, faster issue resolution, and better adoption of best practices.
Together, these elements created a flexible and data-rich environment that empowered recruiters to work smarter, share knowledge globally, and deliver faster results.
The Impact
Cross-skilling and collaboration
With the Software Development Engineering Playbooks, recruiters across regions became cross-skilled in new roles, technologies, and markets, enabling them to support one another seamlessly.
This shared knowledge and sourcing capability helped reduce Time to Offer by 33% for technical roles.
Faster hiring for new markets
When the Dublin TA team was tasked with hiring Paid Marketing Specialists in Madrid, TA.guru delivered a tailored Marketing Specialist Playbook, complete with local market intelligence, sourcing strategy, and outreach guidance.
This resulted in a 50% reduction in Time to Offer and accelerated delivery in a new region.
Accelerated onboarding for new recruiters
A newly hired recruiter, new to tech hiring, quickly ramped up to take ownership of a Cloud Engineer requisition in North America. With TA.guru’s Playbooks, sourcing support, and guidance desk
This led to a qualified pipeline within two weeks — cutting Time to Productivity by 50%.
Key Results
- ⏱️ 33% faster Time to Offer for software engineering roles
- 🎯 50% faster Time to Offer for new marketing roles in Madrid
- 🚀 50% reduction in Time to Productivity for new TA team members
- 🌍 1000+ targeted candidates sourced across multiple regions
- 🧭 On-demand recruiter support desk resolved 100+ queries
“By using TA.guru we’ve proven that enabling talent teams with knowledge drives real productivity and efficiency improvements. Our goal is to become a knowledge-led TA organisation — and TA.guru is core to that mission.”
— Faith Brownell, Global TA Operations Manager, Groupon
In Summary
The Groupon x TA.guru partnership demonstrates how embedding knowledge, intelligence, and real-time enablement transforms global Talent Acquisition.
By combining Recruiter Playbooks, market insights, candidate sourcing, and always-on recruiter support, Groupon accelerated hiring speed, improved recruiter performance, and built a scalable, knowledge-led TA organisation ready for future growth.
About Groupon
Groupon is a global e-commerce marketplace connecting consumers with local merchants by offering goods and services at discounted prices. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, Groupon operates in over 15 countries and serves millions of active customers worldwide.
Key Facts:
- Employees: ~3,000
- Industry: E-commerce / Online Marketplace
- Headquartered: Chicago, Illinois (USA)
Global presence: 16+ offices worldwide - Annual revenue: ~USD 600 million (2023)
