Customer
Meltwater

Industry
SaaS

Company size
2,500+ employees

Global presence
50 offices across 25 countries

Meltwater is a global SaaS company that helps organizations monitor media coverage, analyze sentiment, and turn information into actionable data to help companies make better business decisions. Hiring more than 600 employees each year in 50 offices worldwide (with 27,000 customers), the People team faces a challenge familiar to many talent organizations: How to consistently identify, develop, and retain top talent at scale.

Meltwater turned to Metaview Reports to transform internal interviews with top performers into actionable insights. The results now power hiring, onboarding, and retention strategy across the business, as they continue to build a culture of achievement and excellence.

Capturing top talent differentiators at scale

To find out what makes their best sellers the best, Meltwater’s People team interviewed members of the company’s “Golden Circle,” their top global sellers. The interviews followed a consistent framework to uncover the habits, processes, and motivations behind sustained high performance.

According to Senior Director of Global Talent Carol Ann Vance, all that data was valuable, but not easy to use at first. “We had a huge amount of qualitative insights, but they were scattered across all the interviews we had done. We needed a scalable way to extract all the key themes and turn them into data we could use in our programs.” 

Rather than letting those insights live in isolated conversations, Metaview Reports consolidated and analyzed them together, surfacing patterns that would have been impossible to spot manually. “Using Metaview Reports, we could analyze those interviews at scale instead of treating them as isolated stories.”

Shifting from scattered analysis to structured insights

Meltwater had attempted similar qualitative projects in the past. But the process was always slow, manual, and difficult to sustain. “We would extract all these conversations into Excel, and have somebody go through to create pivot tables and analyze the conversations by hand.”

That approach makes it hard to repeat the work or move quickly from insight to action. And it certainly doesn’t scale.

With Metaview Reports, the team could automatically pull interviews together, identify recurring themes, and convert qualitative feedback into structured insights. And without losing nuance or wasting any time. 

Redesigning hiring with evidence, not intuition

Meltwater recruits more than 600 people each year, with around 30% of those roles in Go-to-Market. The insights surfaced through Metaview Reports are now directly shaping how Meltwater interviews and evaluates candidates. 

“One of the key reasons we did this was to redesign our go-to-market hiring process,” Carol Ann explains. “We’re using the insights to refine our interview questions and assessment criteria.” 

Recruiters and hiring managers can design hiring rubrics and competency frameworks based on what they know about their top performers. 

Fast-tracking onboarding and time to impact

Beyond hiring, Meltwater uses interview insights to improve how quickly new sales hires ramp up and succeed in their role. The People team can train newcomers on the habits of their top-performing peers, reinforcing a commitment to continuous improvement as a team.

Carol Ann says they “train new hires to bring structured daily routines, pipeline discipline, product mastery, and mentorship seeking.” With clearer expectations from day one, new hires can “advance quickly in the first 60 or 90 days.”

The goal is not just better onboarding content, but faster confidence and impact towards building a winning team. 

Using insights to retain top talent

Retention is another critical aim for the project. Meltwater wanted to understand not only what drives performance, but what keeps those top performers engaged. 

“We compared motivation and retention drivers to understand what keeps them motivated,” says Carol Ann. “Why they feel supported, and what might cause them to leave.” 

The data revealed consistent themes across the Golden Circle: visible career progression, strong managerial support, recognition, autonomy, and confidence in the product. These insights are now shaping broader People strategy, from promotion pathways to coaching consistency and global mobility. 

Next steps: scaling beyond sales

With a repeatable framework now in place, this Go-to-Market project is just the beginning. The same interview structure and reporting methodology can be applied across the entire organization.

“Now that we have this framework and we can easily do this using Metaview, the goal is to expand it beyond the Golden Circle,” Carol Ann says. “Who are our top leaders and top performers in Engineering, Product, or Marketing?” 

By scaling this work across departments, Meltwater will continuously improve how it identifies and develops quality talent across the entire organization.

A winning partnership

From the start, Carol Ann saw Metaview as a partner in shaping the approach, not just a vendor providing software. “One of the things I really like about Metaview is how open the Customer Success team is to new use cases,” she explains. 

“I brought this to the table as an excited and passionate talent leader, and they really worked with me to figure out what they could do to support me.”

That openness made it possible to turn an ambitious idea into a scalable, repeatable framework. Instead of pushing back, Metaview leaned in.