How Compa Helped Nuro See a Double-Digit Increase in Offer Acceptance Rates

Nuro is on the cutting edge of robotics. With a world-class team and a unique product, they've raised $2.1 billion in funding from investors like Google, Fidelity, and even Chipotle. 

Even more impressive is their over $100M in future revenue agreements including enterprise partnerships such as FedEx, Walmart, Domino's, and Kroger. The local goods delivery market is estimated to be worth over $1T globally, and it spans major verticals such as retail, food, grocery, pharmacy, convenience, and logistics. 

However, Nuro’s incredible growth brought with it another problem: competition for talent. 

The market for top engineering talent is cutthroat, especially in leading technology areas like robotics and machine learning. Early on, Nuro was stretched to capacity when it came to creating offers, and making sense of the market. Because even though they were capturing data, they just couldn't keep up with the quickly-changing market using in-house tools like spreadsheets and dashboards.

‍They needed more. 

Dakin Gunn, Head of SW Recruiting, tried everything:

‍“We were using spreadsheets at first. And the downfall of spreadsheets is that the data isn’t normalized. If you have twenty different people adding to a spreadsheet every day it gets messy, fast. So we needed a way to make sense of market data and surface market trends to our total rewards team and executive leadership teams.”

But there weren't any tools he knew of to capture that data in a neatly packaged way. Worse still, they couldn't track who they were losing candidates to, or what the competing offers consisted of.

Dakin needed help. He found Compa.

“We needed a database to store all of our offers in… to be able to look at historical offers through an infallible spreadsheet where someone can't accidentally screw up a formula or onboard a candidate with the wrong offer data.”

Over the course of just a few months, and with the help of Compa’s customer experience team, Dakin’s primary need was met - to collect and normalize offer data. Compa helped Dakin and his team leverage real-time market data to:

• Gain insight into Nuro’s competitors to get a better track of the market
• See reports on who they won versus who they lost
• Understand what companies Nuro was actually competing well against 
• Understand what companies Nuro was losing talent to
• Compare candidate expectations to competing offers versus their offer
• See where their offers fell versus their competitors

With Compa’s help, Nuro unlocked access to market insights that were previously unavailable.

And with Compa supplying accurate market data, now Dakin’s team could help better educate hiring managers about the changing market, what type of offers win, where candidates come from, and where candidates' compensation expectations land.

Compa also helped Nuro in other ways. For example, Compa gave Dakin access to previously “unseen narratives” he could use in discussions with leadership about offer approvals and market trends.

“It's been very easy to capture the data. And it's been captured in a normalized manner that our compensation team appreciates.”

Because of Compa, Dakin has ditched the spreadsheets. Now, there's a noticeable decrease in the amount of time it takes to bring compensation challenges to the Total Rewards and leadership teams.

“When we were using manual tracking and spreadsheets, we spent a lot more time on recurring problems. And now, given how fast the market is moving, we're pulling reports very frequently. So we're spending several hours a month less having access to the data in a one-stop-shop instead of, you know, spread out over a bunch of different systems in different spreadsheets.”

Best of all, Nuro has actually been able to adjust and become much more competitive with the market. The impact? They saw an incredible double-digit increase in offer acceptance rates, all made without an increase in offer spend in aggregate.

And while an increase in offer acceptance rate is welcomed, it’s not the only thing that matters. Compa gave Nuro the ability to view and socialize comp trends company wide as well as the ability to better report comp and market data to key stakeholders. So now, everyone is informed, connected, and equipped with up-to-the-second data that helps them make only the best decisions when it comes to talent. 

With Compa in their corner, Dakin’s confident that Nuro is on the right track. Hiring is up, lost offers are down, and Nuro’s commitment to its team is already turning heads and distinguishing it from its competitors.

“It's been very positive. I've appreciated the growth of Compa and there's just a high level of trust and confidence in the relationship, which I think is absolutely critical to any kind of growing business partnership.