TalentHub
A marketplace of direct job matching between freelancers and companies
Timeline: Jan 2022 - Apr 2022 (4 months)
My role: UX Designer
My teammates: Caio Fabricio Ramos Costa, Manuela Kalissi Nonga, Sparsh Sam, Thi Hoai Thu Tran
Deliverables: Personas, Competitive Analysis, SWOT Analysis, Interactive strategy, User Journeys, Prototype
Background
Situation overview
In the first semester of my graduate program in Interactive Media Management at Centennial College, my team was assigned an actual client project for a consultant in Dubai. We were required to design a marketplace of direct job matching between freelancers and companies.
The goal
TalentHub was an idea from our client. She believes students can bring up innovative solutions and valuable insights.
Our goal is that, by the end of this project, our client will anticipate having clear knowledge and guidance on:
- The project opportunities
- The users' requirements, expectations, and goals
- A viable platform layout
Problem Definition
The labour market dilemmas during the Covid-19 pandemic have put pressure on companies, skilled employers, and freelancers. Companies require specialized human resources to implement one-off projects to reduce the investment in full-time employment. At the same pace, professionals want to find additional income from one-off projects besides a full-time job but don't want to spend too much time on paperwork and complicated workflows. Both sides need a simplified, effective, and secure solution for their needs.
Research
Competitive analysis
To conduct the competitive analysis, our client provided one of the biggest competitors – GLG Insights. Meanwhile, we also researched other popular freelancing platforms to find insights.
The above analysis identified some key functions to make TalentHub more competitive.
User interview
We designed two sets of interview questions for companies and freelancers to understand their frustrations and needs. We interviewed 15 people who are either a freelancer or have experience looking to hire a freelancer.
"Current platforms are full of freelancers bidding on projects with extremely low prices, which is ridiculous." - one of the respondents
20%
Only 20% of respondents were satisfied with the current job matching platforms.
Key findings
From the research, we identified two main problems with the current job matching platforms.
- Non-personalized experience
It relies on the users to search for freelancers/jobs using filters by themselves.
- Bias rating
The rating system allows result manipulation. The new but good profiles of freelancers could be ignored or cannot be found by the company.
The Product
Talent Hub - An unbiased and personalized job matching marketplace
What is it?
Talent Hub is a marketplace where businesses may find consultants based on their specialty and experience. The site would use a dual-sided structure, allowing both consultants and businesses to post their profiles. Talent Hub will aggregate and process this information before recommending consultants and organizations to one another, resulting in project opportunities and linking the organizations' demands to the consultants' work. The main goal of the Talent Hub project is to automate the job matching process without bias and with a more interactive experience that creates 2-way communication.
Target Users
- Companies
- Freelancers
Design
Defining the theme
We aimed to solve the problems identified from their user research. As a starting point, we defined the theme – The "perfect" matching.
We want the journey to emphasize on
- the excitement of finding the "perfect" match
- being guided by the interactive form
- valuing freelancers' portfolio
- simple and quick process
Sitemap
We created a sitemap to give our client a clear picture of the website structure.
Personas
From the user interview, we created two personas to represent the two types of target users.
Alena, the idealist
Johnathan, the innocent expert
User journeys
Alena's journey:
Johnathan's journey:
Prototype
We developed the prototype to illustrate the two user journeys.
Alena's journey:
Johnathan's journey:
Next Steps
Although our team only worked for our client for four months, the product hasn't finished. We provided the next steps to our client to move forward.
- Discuss and get alignment on the interactive strategy, including user understanding, the theme and interactive elements, user journey, prototype, and content approach.
- Move to the UI design stage to complete the website for the MVP version.
- Prepare a user acquisition plan to push the platform to companies and freelancers.
Final Thoughts
I am so proud of our team that we accomplished the project. We learned how to communicate with the client and define the product scope to fulfill the client's requirements. We put our learning into practice and contributed to the project as a team. We were glad that she was delighted with the result.