Talent Hound Date: July 25, 2014 Services: App design Finding a job can be hard. There are so many job sites out there. Talent Hound’s goal was to create an aggregator that collects all data in a simple to use app. What began as a quick design exercise blew up into a full fledged application. A simple solution for top level talent to link up with recruiters. But how do we find top talent? With a series of test that hone in on certain skill sets. Figuring out what tools, technical abilities, languages, and responsibilities people had in roles. This series of tests got smarter with an algorithm we had in place that got smarter the more questions a candidate would ask. Talent Hound was a fresh new idea. An app that helped candidates find great companies to work for and for recruiters to find the best talent at ease. Researching this new industry wasn’t an easy task. Competitive analysis was used to see what best practices people we’re using in the industry such as LinkedIn and Indeed and what people we’re saying about bad applications like Monster and Dice. Creating something that was useful to users but didn’t get in the way of their search was the first set tenet I gave to this project. More work on the backend needed to be created so that the front end had less friction when going from point A to point B. Countless iterations. Countless revisions. In the end… Creating this app and building out to MVP was very satisfying. When we didn’t succeed in getting funding the idea still paved the way for new ideas led from the business team that I worked with. Nothing is ever lost if you’ve learned key valuable lessons and insights from your products. Whether the market is a key deal breaker in an business. There are bigger powers at play here than just design. You have to know you multiple channels of business. You have to understand your unique value proposition. And most importantly have to know what your key customer segments are.