On Deck's Talent Marketplace

On Deck's Talent Marketplace matches hundreds of founders and recruiters with jobseekers in the network.

I was a full-time employee at On Deck from June, 2021 until August, 2022.

On Deck was experiencing hypergrowth and the number of fellows that joined either as founders or jobseekers was fast approaching the 10k mark. Our team's mission was to build a hiring dynamic that connected founders in our ecosystem with talent to enable early key hires in startups.

Many platforms connect talent with opportunities, but at On Deck, we redesigned the experience from scratch. We called it Talent Hub.

On the candidate side, signing up required filling out a form that helped jobseekers tell their narrative of where they're going next instead of sharing a snapshot of their past work, as they do on LinkedIn and other sites. We also paired candidates with a team member in the talent experience team I led, to review their profiles and encourage them to create video intros to share their career stories and goals with founders.

On the company side, founders were met with a form that required video intros from the founders and hiring managers. This added friction to the onboarding process but gave talent a much clearer sense of the opportunities in the marketplace.

Our product stack was mostly no-code:

Backend: Airtable

Frontend: Custom-built on On Deck's platform

Automation & Triggers: Zapier and Integromat

User comms: SendGrid

User forms: miniExtensions

Analytics: Mixpanel

Support: Intercom

Talent Hub enabled over 3k intro requests from founders to jobseekers and dozens of placements.

Our team tripled in size to help scale this marketplace to its next version before market conditions hit the company.