Talent matching platform, CakeResume, uses Mixpanel to improve personalization and inform market expansion strategies

Founded in 2016, CakeResume’s vision is to help job seekers fully display their value, by creating an accessible resume builder and promoting job matching between talents and enterprises.

For six years since its inception, CakeResume played a critical role as a new-age talent matching platform. In 2022, they launched a new website with social media features with a goal of becoming an influential talent community. Compared with other talent matching platforms, CakeResume places more importance in developing talent-facing tools and services. For example, it allows talents to import multimedia files into their resumes, enabling them to better showcase their digital portfolios and display their diverse skills.

CakeResume’s Founder and CEO Trantor Liu values data-based insights. Since the company’s inception, CakeResume has used Mixpanel to see what is and isn’t working in its products, improve prioritization, accelerate innovation, and develop better products.

Here are some of the benefits that CakeResume has gained from having Mixpanel on board since Day 1:

Reduce customer churn

Mixpanel helps CakeResume identify bottlenecks where customers stop engaging and converting so they can make appropriate optimizations to reduce customer churn.

Optimize the customer journey

Mixpanel helps CakeResume understand how users are interacting with their platform, where they are clicking and how often, whether users follow the designed user flow, whether users understand the intent of certain product features, and whether users repeat certain steps in their journey.

Prioritize resources to accelerate innovation

By understanding what is and isn’t working with their product, CakeResume is better able to  allocate resources.

Find product-market fit faster

Using Mixpanel to track events, CakeResume found that the conversion rates for its Indonesian users were particularly strong compared to other overseas markets. As a result, the company has invested more resources in Indonesia to grow market share.

Using Funnels to build a process for personalization

To achieve their vision of putting users first, CakeResume is committed to better understanding user behaviors through analytics, and making decisions based on user behaviors. For instance, CakeResume leverages the integration between Mixpanel’s Cohorts and OneSignal to trigger a series of personalized communications that re-engages users and build better relationships with them.

CakeResume’s Associate Marketing Manager, Sindy Chen, explained, “We tag each member (with information like what jobs they are looking for, what skills they have and what issues they pay attention to) through Mixpanel, identify what stage of the user journey the member is in, and then send out personalized emails via OneSignal based on our understanding of each individual user. In doing so, we are able to engage in more precise dialogue with users of different behaviors, needs and profiles. This is why our emails can come across as more humanized.”

The best personalized emails give recipients the impression that the sender is sending the email personally and not to a large mailing list. To achieve this, CakeResume learns through Mixpanel’s Funnels report how each user interacts with the product after registration (including editing, publishing, downloading and other actions related to resume building). After tagging each user and grouping them into cohorts like “Registered with no resume created”, “Incomplete resume”, and “Resume completed but not published”, they export these cohorts into OneSignal to send them emails with personalized messaging.

CakeResume builds a set of post-registration user journeys and sets up trigger events, such as no follow-up actions for a few days after registration, not publishing a resume after creating it and so on. Once the trigger goes off, personalized emails will be sent out, providing effective tips to re-engage users so as to give users a smoother resume-building experience and to continue driving conversions.

Using data to inform market expansion strategies

In addition to building user paths, Mixpanel also offers CakeResume multiple reports to quickly gain insights on what strategic business direction to take.

For example, through tracking events, CakeResume found that of all countries, its products were very widely used in Indonesia, and therefore decided to invest more resources in the Indonesian market.

Sindy Chen pointed out, “When we first expanded overseas, we mostly targeted English-speaking markets only to discover that the competition was exceptionally fierce there. Later on, after tracking our users for a period of time using Mixpanel, looking at metrics around user registration, editing, publishing and download rates, we discovered that Indonesian users, compared to those in English-speaking markets, are more active on our website. Thus, we decided to place more resources in the Indonesian market.”

Since entering the Indonesian market in 2021, CakeResume has amassed more than 500,000 local users, thus promoting cross-border talent matching, and improving their business performance.

Building cross-functional metrics

Besides turning to Mixpanel for analytics capabilities and personalization, CakeResume has to build effective cross-functional data metrics to establish user-centric products, marketing and business strategies.

CakeResume tracks their data through two ways: (1) Google Analytics (GA) for overall and real-time traffic data and (2) Mixpanel for more detailed data of registered users to make up for what GA and other analytics tools cannot track, and to gather more in-depth user insights.

For an online platform, creating consistent cross-functional metrics is paramount and conducive to shaping a data-driven corporate culture. Sindy Chen added, “From a business perspective, our team uses data reports provided by Mixpanel to convince our recruiting partners that CakeResume is capable of recruiting the talents they need. From a product perspective, our team can compare conversion and retention rates before and after each product update to ensure that the upgraded version does bring the performance up a notch. Additionally, our marketing team makes market observations based on the data reports and makes corresponding decisions according to the trends of user behaviors.”