EvergreenA little over a week ago, I wrote about something that had been bugging me since we launched Talon.
We had jobs on the platform. Employers and recruiters were signing up. And people kept telling me they were looking for work. So you'd think job seekers would be flooding in.
They weren't. Getting people to actually use Talon was a lot harder than I'd expected.
We had plenty of theories about why. Maybe people weren't ready to apply yet. Maybe they didn't have a CV. Maybe after years of rejections, applying for one more job just felt like signing up for another letdown.
I think all of that is true. But there was one explanation we hadn't really wanted to look at: maybe Talon itself was part of the problem.
So we asked
Rather than sit around coming up with more theories, we decided to talk to the people themselves.
We ran a focus group with some of the same people I'd first approached about Talon. It was a good mix. Some had signed up and were using it. Some had tried it once and never come back. Some had said "sounds great" and then never quite got started.
What they told us was really useful. It also stung a bit.
Talon was doing too much.
Guilty of feature creep
Here's the thing about building software: every new feature feels like progress. You spot a problem, you build something to fix it. Then you add an option, then a new section, then something to tie it all together. From where we sat, it looked great. Look at everything it can do!
From where our users sat, it looked like homework.
That's more or less what we heard. Too many options, too much going on, too many moments where people had to stop and figure out what they were supposed to do next. Even some people who'd made an account didn't feel confident enough to come back and carry on.
That one hurt, because the whole point of Talon is to make finding your next job easier. If you need a walkthrough just to work out what to do after you log in, we've gone wrong somewhere.
Deleting our own work
I'll be honest, this part isn't fun. Sometimes making a product better means adding things. Sometimes it means taking out stuff you spent weeks building and trying not to sulk about it.
We simplified the design. We took some features out. We cut down the number of choices people have to make.
And we changed the question we ask ourselves. We used to think about what Talon could do. Now we try to think about what the person in front of it actually needs right now. It's a small shift on paper, but it's changed how we approach pretty much everything.
Showing why a job is a match
One thing we really wanted to fix was the matching.
Telling someone they're a "strong match" doesn't mean much on its own. The first thing anyone wants to know is: says who, and why?
So now, when you open a job, you can see which parts of your profile led to the match. Your experience, your skills, the bits of your background that
