Context
Canva grew from roughly 700 employees in 2019 to over 4,500 by 2024, opening engineering hubs in Manila, Beijing, Prague, and Vienna alongside Sydney. The default scaling pattern would have been to outsource recruiting to regional firms and lose calibration.
Decision
Canva built a centralized recruiting operations team that owned hiring quality globally, with regional recruiters reporting into it. Every hiring loop used the same scorecard, the same calibration cadence, and the same final-round practice — a 'values fit' interview run by trained employees from outside the candidate's hiring team. The bar was deliberately treated as a global, not regional, decision.
Consequence
Quality stayed measurably high across regions, and the Manila and Prague hubs became known internally as among the strongest engineering cultures in the company — not weaker offshore extensions. Time-to-hire stayed competitive because the system was real, not theatrical.
“Centralize the bar, distribute the execution.”
— the lesson, in one line
Lesson
Regional hiring at scale fails when the bar is set locally. Centralize the bar, distribute the execution. Recruiters should report into a global function that owns quality, not into the regional GM whose interest is filling seats.
What most retellings miss
Manila and Prague becoming 'among the strongest engineering cultures' wasn't an outcome — it was a consequence of refusing to let regional GMs influence the calibration data.
The Aire angle
Aire makes calibration data visible — which interviewers are aligned with outcomes, which regions are drifting, which loops produce the strongest hires.
Sources
HR Asia case studies are editorial analysis of public reporting and on-the-record interviews. They are not legal advice and do not reflect the views of the companies covered.
Share this on LinkedIn
The Canva case study on HR Asia is the clearest take I've read on distributed hiring. Regional hiring at scale fails when the bar is set locally. Centralize the bar, distribute the execution. https://hrasia.co/cases/canva-distributed-hiring
The reader does the sharing. Every share credits HR Asia and links back.
Most of the talent decisions in this case study are decisions Aire makes structurally easier — calibration data, retention triggers, succession visibility.
See how Aire works