TL;DR

As Senior Product Manager at Braintrust, I streamlined the user onboarding process to reduce delays, enabling job seekers to apply faster while maintaining candidate quality for hiring managers. By redesigning activation flows, shifting screening processes, and implementing asynchronous screening tools, I achieved an 85% increase in user activations and grew the user base from 70k to 185k within a quarter, driving job hires and revenue growth.

Problem

As the Senior Product Manager at Braintrust, a blockchain-powered job hiring marketplace, my role was to grow the job seeker side of the marketplace while ensuring quality job applications for our B2B clients like Meta, Airbnb, and NASA. Within my first couple of weeks in the role I noticed in the data we had a n issue with low activation rates (applications) despite seeing significant sign-ups at the top of the funnel.

I discovered there was an 11-day delay between sign-up to activation and began to dig into our user onboarding process to better understand the issue. Through user research I learned that our screening process for new users was delaying users from being able to apply for jobs and thus jobs were already filled or the job seekers had found jobs elsewhere by that time. Therefore, I needed to find a way to continue providing a high-quality candidate pool for hiring managers while allowing job seekers to apply to jobs and get screened faster.

Approach

I worked with our designers and engineers to make the "Apply" button visible for all new users before being screened, moving the "activation" higher in the funnel. Next, I worked with the team to separeate "Approved" versus "Not yet approved" candidates in the applicant pool for hiring managers to ensure quality control. Lastly, I collabored with our Operations team to move our screeners to the middle of the funnel to focus on screening new users who applied for jobs versus lower-value users who had not yet applied. Finally, I worked with engineering to implement a 3rd party screening tool using an API to allow for asynchronous screening of those lower-value users.

Impact

These changes in the onboarding funnels and operations improved the overall user experience leading to an 85% increase in user activations and grew our overall user base from 70k to 185k users in a quarter, both contributing to an increase of job hiring and revenue.

Boost job marketplace sign-ups 85%