A.Team
Helping clients uncover and hire the best talent easily and quickly.
Recognitions
Award
Fast Company
World Changing Ideas
Award
Inc. Power Player One
Leader in AI & Data
Services
Design strategy
User research
Market research
Data analysis
Interaction design
Interface design
Design system
Deliverables
Design roadmap
Research report
Product spec
Product tracking plan
6 products brought to market
Team involved
Sergei Bekeshkin
Product Manager
Vivian Chow
Product Manager
Jim Camut
Head of Engineering
Dmitry Platonov
Engineer
Max Metti
Engineer
Introduction
In 2022, I joined A.Team, a members only network that helps the world’s most exciting companies find top, vetted, freelance tech talent for their projects.
While finding a job is challenging, securing great talent presents its own unique difficulties. Things are even more complicated when you need a freelance, flexible talent that can work on projects with varying engagement.
In my second year at A.Team, I transitioned to the demand side, focusing on identifying and understanding the specific challenges our clients face. My goal was to help them overcome these obstacles and hire top talent more efficiently.
Uncovering the challenges
Before starting any strategy or design work, I embarked on a discovery process to understand our clients' needs and challenges. I spoke with all client-facing teams, conducted 1:1 interviews with clients to learn about their difficulties with the platform and talent acquisition, and analyzed thousands of hours of recorded sales calls and available data.
The research revealed two types of issues: platform-specific problems and broader challenges in the hiring industry.
Globally, companies struggle with reviewing large numbers of applicants, who often aren't vetted, leading to a time-consuming qualification process. Applicants frequently fail to connect their experience to client requirements, making it hard for clients to assess relevance and choose the right talent. As a result, many clients abandon the process due to its length and complexity, opting to pivot or hire internally.
On our platform, the signup and onboarding process was flawed, deterring many potential clients. Our website failed to clearly convey the value of our services, resulting in low conversion rates, with most conversions coming from referrals. The interview process was managed off-platform, taking 14 to 21 days with no visibility for our teams, often leading to lost deals. Additionally, our client app was cluttered, offering five different hiring paths, which caused confusion, choice paralysis, and many abandoned profiles.
Designing the solution
When I started improving the client platform experience, I categorized issues by complexity and impact, focusing first on high-impact, low-complexity problems. This approach provided quick wins for new clients. We then tackled more complex, critical issues to reduce time to hire and secure more deals.
Simplified onboarding
Similar to the demand side, we started by simplifying the signup and onboarding process, reducing it from over 30 steps that were owned by multiple teams, to just a few key ones.
The new onboarding consisted of a few integral questions that helped us understand clients' needs immediately and personalize their experience within the app, immediately increasing relevance and simplifying their workflow.
Decreasing time-to-hire
We cut the average time to interview from 14-21 days to just 2 days by integrating interview process into the platform and allowing clients and customers to schedule calls directly through A.Team instead of third party applications. This not only sped up the process, but also gave us more insight into the process, so we could help out when issues arise, preventing lost leads due to technical difficulties.
We also introduced an AI-driven interview tool that helped clients understand more about the builders by asking follow-up questions and getting instant, AI-generated answers based on talent profiles, helping clients quickly understand if our members were a fit, before they set up the live interviews, further increasing the speed to hire.
Connecting the experience to requirements
To help the clients better understand why a certain applicant is recommended, simplify the selection and cut down the time required to review applicants, we enhanced how we presented our talent. We introduced proposals, that would show only the best talent, either hand selected by our team, or automatically by our AI powered selection system.
Furthermore, we created new, AI-powered talent cards. These cards highlighted relevant projects, industry experience, and skills, making it easier for clients to see how talent matched their needs. With better data from AI-assisted applications and new talent profile, clients could draw a direct connection between their request and the applicants they see and make informed decisions much faster.
And finally, we've created an AI-supported search refinement. If the client wants to adjust the list of talent they were presented, they can filter out the search that has context-aware suggestions. The system reads the clients initial requirements and suggests additional requirements, technical and soft skills and takes in free-text directions from the user to curate the best results.
Making things simple
Finally, we made several significant simplifications to the client app. As I mentioned earlier, we streamlined the onboarding process, enabling clients to define their needs in just two steps and assemble a team in minutes — a major improvement from the previous version that took over 50 minutes.
Additionally, we shifted the platform’s structure from a workspace orientation to a project-oriented approach. This change made navigation more intuitive, keeping everything focused and helping users understand the flow of the platform more easily.
Improving the workflow
We transitioned to a progressive disclosure, linear experience within our app. This approach means we gradually reveal features to clients based on their immediate needs, rather than overwhelming them with all pages and content upfront. Initially, clients see the pages where they add their requirements. Once that’s done, we open the proposal section where they select talent, followed by the documents section for managing contracts, and so on.
This method keeps clients focused on one task at a time, ensuring a goal-oriented, streamlined experience that helps them move through the process more efficiently.
Outcome
The new onboarding and signup process together with website improvements lead to unlocking the outbound leads and converting 143% better then before, with most of the clients being new users who haven’t heard of A.Team before. And we’ve accomplished a 98% completion rate for everyone who started the signup process.
The new interview process was on average 14x faster than before, leading to a massive increase in won deals due to speed and simplicity.
The new discovery, preview and selection of talent further increased our conversion from user to customer by 64% due to relevance, speed and ease of selection.
All these initiatives lead to a record number of active talent hired on projects, increasing the company revenue by 70% and a satisfaction with initial hires to over 92%.
