Diverse talent clouds

2020

The Diverse Talent Cloud, powered by The Mom Project, was designed to become the go-to source of highly skilled, diverse talent for Enterprise customers. Its goal was to create lasting change in the employment landscape for moms, underrepresented minorities, and allies at scale. The platform helped Enterprise partners who shared that mission make faster progress against underrepresentation in the workforce through an inclusive algorithm and a shared commitment to building a more accessible, equitable future of work that kept the mom experience front and center.

What were we solving?

For Talent

How might we elevate our top talent and provide them with high-quality jobs faster than on our current marketplace product?

For Employers

How might we give enterprise companies direct access to our diverse pool of top talent?

Business needs

  • Permanently impact the employment landscape in favor of Moms, underrepresented minorities, and allies at a large scale. 

  • Partner with companies who share in our mission to design the workplace of the future; one that is more accessible, equitable, and always keeps the Mom experience front and center. 

  • Increase the amount of hires and speed up the hiring process by providing our enterprise partners with direct access to our top talent.

We conducted user interviews to understand their main needs.

Top talents' needs

  • Greater flexibility in work arrangements

  • Higher frequency access to the types of jobs and fair pay they desire

  • A feeling of exclusivity in the roles they are being presented to

  • Personal, special experience that feels different than the marketplace product

  • Employer Trust & engagement - Employers and work that they can feel connected to

  • Work cultures that value them as Moms and Allies

Enterprise employers' needs

  • They want to foster greater innovation by increasing employee diversity and meeting DEI targets

  • A better way to attract & retain diverse talent. Traditional job postings don’t enable the level of curation that increasingly matters to employers because by nature, anyone can apply to a job.

  • Attract and retain highly skilled and engaged candidates quickly

  • Labor force flexibility - be able to quickly scale their workforce up and down as needed while minimizing talent acquisition costs (hire pre-vetted, curated talent for the necessary roles)

MVP solution

We created an internal tool that helped talent managers quickly build curated pools of candidates, or “clouds,” for Enterprise hiring needs. When a company came to The Mom Project looking to hire multiple candidates for a specific role, talent managers defined the cloud parameters based on the client’s needs. The proprietary matching algorithm then identified and populated the cloud with top matching talent. Those candidates were notified that they had been invited to the program and could opt in, giving talent managers a focused pool of qualified, available candidates to review and submit to the client.

While the long-term vision was to create a self-service product for employers, the MVP was intentionally launched as an internal tool first so the team could gather feedback, test the matching algorithm, and refine the experience before releasing it externally.

UI for internal talent managers

It included 3 main experiences:

Cloud Listing page

Users could browse existing clouds, filter to find the right one, or start creating a new cloud.

Cloud Creation

Users set the parameters for a new cloud
before running a match.

Cloud listing page

For MVP, the cloud listing page was the main page for internal talent managers. They could view an existing cloud or create a new one.

Talent managers could easily filter/search through existing clouds, and they could pin clouds to quickly navigate to their most frequently used clouds.

Reviewing Talent

After a cloud was created, users could review top matches and find the right candidate.

Cloud Creation

Before we could run the match algorithm to create a cloud, talent managers had to designate the type of candidates they were looking for.

They could be as detailed or as generic as they wanted. Required fields were cloud name, company vs. stock cloud, superpower (internal phrase for job category), and the primary job capabilities.

If they wanted to be more specific, they could add additional skills, relevant job titles, years of experience, and industries.

Reviewing Talent

After the cloud finished generating a list of matching talent, talent managers could click into the cloud to review top talent.

In the cloud, they can see a high-level view of all the talent in a grid. We tested theses talent cards with talent managers to make sure we provided them with the right info and hierarchy so they can quickly find the best candidates at a glance.

This final card design allowed talent managers to quickly scan through many members at a time. If they wanted a more detailed view of the candidate, they can view their profile.

The colored circle next to the talent’s name showed if the person was available to work.

Outcomes

(Last updated April 2021)

Internal MVP launched in March 2021

Talent managers started moving existing enterprise clients over to the talent cloud experience, and the sales team started pitching to new companies to expand the customer base and fill their hiring needs.

8500 top talent added to talent clouds

In a month, talent managers were able to speed up their sourcing process and quickly identify the best talent for enterprise clients

Next steps

(Last updated April 2021)

Finalize talent experience

Although not touched upon in this case study, a huge part of this product is the talent side. In order to get talent opted-in and keep their availability updated, there must be a talent-side experience. For MVP, the plan was to have it as a quick email acceptance, but the goal was to make it a more robust product in the future.

Start optimizing for employer release

The team will gather feedback from the Talent Mangers as they use the internal tool to optimize the product for wide release to enterprise clients in Q4 2021. The goal would be for this to eventually be a self-service tool.

Business goals are changing 

This product has completely changed the direction of The Mom Project’s organization and company goals, and Diverse Talent Cloud grew their projected revenue by 3X.