E-commerce & retail
How Catawiki finds niche specialists during hypergrowth
A 750-person Dutch e-commerce marketplace hired 100+ people in one year, lifted applications 40%, and ran a 12-person recruiting team on Join + Greenhouse.
TL;DR
A 750-person Dutch e-commerce marketplace hired 100+ people in one year, lifted applications 40%, and ran a 12-person recruiting team on Join + Greenhouse.
Catawiki is a Dutch online auction marketplace for special objects — art, design, collectibles, jewellery, watches. Founded in 2008, the company has grown past 750 employees with operations across the Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain and Germany. Hiring at that pace creates a specific problem: the niche-specialist roles (auction experts in narrow categories) can’t be filled with generic recruiting channels.
The Challenge
Three issues compounded during international expansion:
- Channel selection per market. France, Italy, Spain and Germany each have different dominant boards, and the rate at which specialist applicants find them varies wildly.
- Niche-specialist sourcing. Auction experts for “20th-century Italian design” or “vintage Swiss watches” don’t browse generic job boards. Reaching them needs both volume and the right specialist channels per category.
- Workflow at scale. Twelve people in talent acquisition — recruiters, employer branding, sourcers, ops — all need to operate from the same view, with attribution data they can act on.
The Solution
Catawiki runs Join on top of Greenhouse. Greenhouse stays the candidate-data system of record; Join handles the publish layer across 15+ boards (LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, Stack Overflow, Relocate.me, plus per-country specialists) and feeds attribution data back through the integration.
The recommendations layer in Join surfaces additional boards per role and per market — which is how the team identifies new specialist channels for the harder niches without each recruiter having to maintain their own spreadsheet of options.
The Results
In a year:
- 40% lift in applicant volume from the Join channel mix.
- 100+ hires completed in 2021 alone, across the full range from generalist operations to deep specialists.
- 12-person recruiting team all operating in the same toolset, with attribution data shared rather than siloed.
The strongest part of Catawiki’s pattern is the integration model. Join doesn’t replace Greenhouse — it sits in front of it. Greenhouse keeps doing what enterprise ATSes do well; Join does the publish-and-attribute work that enterprise ATSes consistently do poorly. The combination is what scales.
